This poem arose from a story that was referenced by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves. Her book is a fascinating dive into old mythological stories and how they relate to a woman’s psyche.
The story of La huesera, or the bone woman, is an old legend from the mountains of Mexico. The bone woman wanders the deserts and collects the bones she finds. Her passion is wolf bones. She reassembles the skeleton, and when she has all the bones collected and laid out, she sits in silence and listens for the song that belongs to that wolf. And when she feels the song within her, she sings. She sings it over the wolf until it comes to life.
The symbolism this holds for a soul that is lost is beautiful. The pieces of yourself that you lost are still out there, and there is a song that will knit them together again.
This piece is published in the Eastern PA Poetry Review 2024, published by Local Gems Press.
The Bone Woman
The bone woman sings.
She
gathers the bones
of the wolf who has died
and pieces her together
in skilled symphony, untangling
her alabaster riddles, memorizing
her shadows, tracing the red pathways
and black alleys until she lies
unbroken and barren.
And the bone woman sings.
Sings until the bones knit in tandem
and the marrow opens,
Sings until fur shrouds the hollows
and the veins fill,
Sings until the chest heaves upward
and the nose whispers,
Sings until the throat whines
and the eyes shiver,
Sings until the womb surges
and the tongue swells.
She
is on her feet,
throbbing with daybreak,
with thunder aching for rain,
unfurling winter limbs, inhaling
the winds of a forgotten world, her
body an enigma curving west
into blue moon brilliance,
into stillness.
The bone woman sings.
-s. rochelle
