Hera

The Mother stood on the edge of the beach.  Her black hair curled around her temples and down her shoulders, the slick wet of them sticking to the nape of her neck with the rain that fell from the oblivion sky.  Newness of life, she was, she brought forth.  Women, we are the only ones who feel the pain in the nascent fog, heavy with wet, and life.

Hera was still lithe, still regal in her bearing.  A goddess mother after all has a form that is nothing more than a skin around imagination and eternity.  Her loose light garment stuck to her body, both were pale white, a person who grabbed the garment and pulled may at first have wondered at the elasticity of her skin.  The sea, it’s foam white horses rushing at her knees, drew back the sand under the soles of her feet.  Tiny enamel clams encrusted her toes.  Seaweed wrapped itself around her ankle.   She didn’t kick it off, but started to walk along the shore, dragging it with her as her brown eyes stared at that point in the mist where the sea and the sky merged, the pulsing line where water and air converge.

She couldn’t remember how long she had stood on this shore.  She wasn’t sure if her skin was new or a husk reawakened with the moisture in the sky.

Goddesses do not fear; they have no life to lose; they cling to the backbone of existence.  But as she stared at the horizon line, Hera noticed that the mouth of her human skin had dry lips.  Perhaps something was pushing through her pride, a certain turmoil at the sight of the indescribable pulsing against the horizon.

  She saw her brother.  He, not a mother, needed no form that wasn’t the movement of the waves as they battered the shore and the sky.