These two poems were written in response to the Mother House module on Sylvia Lindsteadt’s ‘When Women Were the Land‘ course for Advaya. Lindsteadt’s conception of the Mother House is rooted in Neolithic matrilineal and matrilocal cultures wherein husbands marry into the Mother House rather than women leaving and entering their husband’s house. She also notes the role of the Mother House in monastic traditions. Lindsteadt reads the Greek myth of the abduction of Persephone by Hades as one of Her being taken from Her mother, Demeter’s, house. When I returned to our northern British pre-Christian myth of Creiddylad’s abduction by Gwyn ap Nudd, which shares many parallels, the lines about Creiddylad being shut up in Her father’s house led me to suspect this may be a Mother House story too.

Taken From My Mother’s House

‘Creiddylad daughter of Lludd Llaw Eraint went off with Gwythyr son of Greidol, but before he could sleep with her Gwyn son of Nudd came to take her by force. Gwythyr son of Greidol gathered a host and Gwyn triumphed… Arthur heard of this and came to the North, and summoned Gwyn son of Nudd to him, and released his noblemen from his prison, and made peace between Gwyn son of Nudd and Gwythyr son of Greidol. This is the agreement that was made: the maiden was to be left in her father’s house, untouched by either party, and there was to be battle between Gwyn and Gwythyr every May Day forever from that day until Judgement Day, and the one that triumphed on Judgement Day would take the maiden.’
~ Culhwch and Olwen

I was taken from my mother’s house then locked up in my father’s house 

so the men like to tell the story. Let me tell you another tale. Of how I was not picking but making flowers, as I made love – styles, stigmas, anthers, stamens, parts that stick to each other and fit together perfectly. 

So I chose to go off with Gwythyr son of Greidol and to go with my brother, Gwyn son of Nudd, to Annwn, to his land of bones to make flowers and love.

Messy the battle, the roses white and red, some say King Arthur ended it. They’re wrong – it was me – it was me and my flowers that brought peace.

And I still live here in my mother’s house with all my flowers and earthly greenery twining my head and limbs and choose to go with my otherworld husband when his hounds call and the trees beg to leave their leaves.

As for my father’s house deep in the sea there are no doors or locks.

As for Judgement Day there are no ends or beginnings in the endless love story between my mother’s house, this earth, or my brother’s house, deep Annwn.

Between the two pass the spirits of the mothers and the fathers, of the sisters and the brothers, no Arthurs are needed to broker the deals between.

Not Taken From My Mother House

They were taken from their mother house
time and time again – 
surnames erased,
Collison, Allen, Curtis…

But what were these names
attached at the end as they married off
and entered the houses of their husband’s fathers?

My surname has never fitted easily with me
and neither has my mother’s received
from a husband ab hominem.

Perhaps that’s why I have 
shrugged them off with my nunnery.

Whatever would my ancestors think
if they knew I had married a God
who did not take me away to the Otherworld
but came instead to dwell here in my Mother House –
here, on my altar, in this sanctuary, in my heart, in my blood?

Here in my mother house where I would keep the skulls
of my mothers and their holy relics if I had them
but instead we keep my great grandmother’s
chest of drawers, cribbage board,
gnarly old desk, cutlery…

I am building shrines to my mothers
and hoping they will understand the changes –

why I married a God who will let our names and spirits flow
into the Otherworld and back again more fluently than any river.

I stand here, now, in my Mother House, timeless, eternal, 
knowing I will not last forever or be erased.