Jessica Woodville | Memoir & Musings

There’s a place in Greece where the earth once whispered through women.
Where the veil was thin and the questions we’re afraid to ask rose like smoke from the stones.

Delphi.
The navel of the world.
The place I’ve dreamed of reaching not just with my feet, but with my full, returned self.

This poem was written as a ritual. A prayer. A remembering.
I wrote it for the Oracle.
I wrote it for the woman I used to be.
I wrote it for the woman I’m becoming—on the way to Athens, barefoot and burning.

If you have a question of your own, I hope you find yourself somewhere in these lines.

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Question for the Oracle – Delphi Invocation

I have crossed time to find you.
Not in golden robes, but in threadbare strength.
Not with tribute, but with truth.

What would you ask,
if the smoke curled just for you?
If the mountain held its breath
to hear the question that lives in your ribs?

I do not ask for love—
I have known its shadows.
I do not ask for health—
though I carry the ache of absence.

I ask:
What part of me is still hiding beneath the rubble?
What name did I forget
when I first learned to disappear?

Tell me how to return
not to what I was
but to what I was meant to become.

Let the wind answer,
let the stones remember,
let the gods know I came,
barefoot and burning
with nothing but the hope
that I am not too late
to begin again.

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If you’ve ever stood at your own crossroads—between survival and becoming, between silence and song—this is your sign. Ask your question. Let the gods, or your own voice, answer.

📍Delphi is waiting. And so are you.