The Thunder, Perfect Mind

A revelation poem with no cosmology, no myth and no argument — only a voice, feminine, speaking in paradoxes that refuse to resolve: I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the mother and the daughter. … Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard! Nobody knows what movement produced it. Its nearest kin in Jewish literature is not a doctrine but a figure: Shekhinah, the presence who is queen and exile at once, and Chokhmah/Sophia in Proverbs 8, crying in the street where no one listens. Read them together and the family resemblance is startling — a divine feminine who is simultaneously the most exalted thing and the most despised.