What Was Taken Was Not Lost by Choice
They never asked.
They came with softer words than fire,
but the ground split open the same way,
a season swallowed whole
and forced to answer to a false name.
They found her in the thaw,
in mud and breath and animal heat,
in the way the earth renewed itself
without permission,
without apology.
And that would not do.
So they cleaned her.
Scraped the dirt from her hands,
pressed her mouth shut over its teeth and hunger,
wrapped the wildness in white cloth
and called the submission sacred.
They took the dawn fires
and replaced them with candles.
Took the east, the direction of rising,
and built their altars toward it
as if the sun had always answered to them.
They took the eggs, the broken earth,
the hare at the edge of the wood,
the planting prayers, the blood-warm rites,
the names women spoke into seed and soil,
and stripped the women out of them.
They kept what they could not erase.
Erased what they could not control.
Then told a better story over it.
One where death behaves.
Where life returns on command.
Where power kneels upward
instead of clawing its way out of the ground.
A god on a cross where a goddess stood.
A resurrection sanded smooth.
A world taught to forget its mother.
And we learned it.
We repeated it until it felt like truth,
handed it down like something earned,
until forgetting became devotion.
We stood at the edge of the thaw,
called it by the wrong name,
and felt something underneath it
shift.
But the earth never learned their language.
The ground breaks open the same way,
slow, ungovernable,
roots splitting whatever names
we try to bury them under.
Beneath the hymns.
Beneath the careful lies.
Beneath the cross they drove into her chest,
something older keeps breathing.
Not forgiving.
Not asking.
Not gone.
Step outside the story.
Feel it in the damp air,
in the soil that will not stay closed,
in the fires lit before the sun clears the hill,
in the hare that runs whether or not you tame it,
in the egg that holds a turning world
and answers to no church of man.
She was here before the lie was told.
She endured it.
She is still here.
You chant the name they gave you.
Then say hers.
Ostara.
Eostre.
Easter.
Not buried.
Not broken.
Not bound.
And never yours.