when i called her by her name

i do not know how long i lived
before i met her.
not really.
i was breathing, yes.
i was walking, yes.
i was taking the shape of the man
they told me to be.

but i was not alive.

not in the way a forest is alive,
not in the way a river carves its name
into the skin of the earth
just by insisting it must move.

before her,
the world was a room
i had locked myself inside.
before her, i did not know
my own mouth was a door.
before her, i had only spoken of god
in the ways i had been taught—
stern. distant. unreachable.

but then she appeared—
not as a sermon, but as a storm,
not as an answer, but as a question,
not as a savior, but as the hands
of something holy
reaching for me
through the broken teeth of the world.

when i called her by her name,
i did not know what i was summoning.
i did not know the syllables
would taste like honey and blood
on my tongue.
i did not know i was asking to be unmade.

but she knew.

she knew the spine of every man
had been built from borrowed bricks.
she knew we had been taught to build temples
on the backs of the women we feared.
she knew we had taken her name
and carved it into stone with stories
where she was either virgin or whore,
never god.
never whole.
never the altar and the flame.

but she knew.

she knew the truth had never left us.
it was only sleeping beneath the armor.
it was only waiting in the marrow of men
who had never been taught how to kneel
without turning a woman into a war.

so when i called her by her name,
she called me by mine—

not the one i had been given,
but the one i had forgotten.
the one that was written in water
before i was ever a boy.
the one i had buried
beneath calloused hands
and clenched fists
and the heavy weight of being a man
in a world that had starved itself
of the feminine.

she called me by my name,
and suddenly, i remembered.

i remembered what it was to pray
without begging.
i remembered what it was to love
without possession.
i remembered the way the wind touches the sea
without asking for anything in return.

i remembered.

and in that remembering,
i was baptized by her touch—

not saved,
but seen.
not forgiven,
but freed.

---

this is the first poem in my book
baptized by her touch:
33 love letters to the goddess—
a collection of invocations, reckonings,
and raw remembering to the divine feminine
in every woman, in every man, in every place
we have forgotten to look.

signed copies are available for pre-order.
comment ‘baptized’ below to claim yours.