Friday 55 June 22 2018

The burden of events this week is heavy. The visions before us are almost apocalyptic in their power. Yet what else can we do but write. My previous poem (on Wednesday) was my pitiful attempt not to address, but at least to respond, to the hatred, cynical evil and destruction of our world's moral and political fiber. Today, it's time for the 55. Thanks to Galen Hayes for starting this meme that is all that keeps my pen moving. There are no rules except the word count--55 words of prose or poetry, no more no less. Link your work in the comments below between Friday and Saturday at midnight, and I will be by to read.

My 55:

Dark-Lantern

The heart's a dark-lantern

thorn-cradled in

a cliff-cracking tree,

a nested-bird glimmer

in grey-green leaves 

by  perpetual sea

where language is

sibilant as spray,

arcane as whales' song,

grey-green as their play.

Light itself speaks from

the branch wind-whispered

and never stutters

tho the window shutters; through

the grey-green bars night

echoes with stars.

~June 2018

Note: "A dark lantern is a candle lantern with a sliding shutter so that it may conveniently be made dark without extinguishing the candle" ~wikipedia

Top Image: Olive tree~Candle, ©Christos Bokoros 1994.    All Rights Reserved

The 55 is now closed. Thanks to all who stopped by to participate. See you next week.

Hex

Hex

When night is black

and miles deep

packed around the sleeping sheep,

when stars hang, turning

on the gallows breeze,

past the witchwood, past the reavers

come the shadows, come the hexers.

When steel blade breaks,

when there is no hammer,

the weak must make do

with the flames of summer

to burn the curse in with red and yellow,

with living swords

with poison murmur.

There where the ivy

chokes the oak

old ones fall in the unraveling work

the young complete, for

cradle-cloth ends in a winding sheet.

Hands that bake bread

will dress the meat

and black night will come

neither swift nor slow

to lay kings low.

   

~April 2017

Images: The Sheepfold by Moonlight, 1856, Jean-Francois Millet, public domain

Photograph, via the internet, author and title unknown. Fair use.

White Bird In Snow

White Bird In Snow

This unsleeping night

remembers winter for me

as it remembers the January hour

I was born, seeing past the still

green curl of April's exhausted leaf

the chill glassful of north wind,

so delicately sipped now

before the drowning.

It knows my name, it calls me

winter girl, drifted witch, 

snow-woman globed from rolled

frozen fog, compressed cloud wrack,
sentinel-eyed and carrot-beaked,
ice fingers melted then
rigid again around

a hollow pen;

bent wrist, bent back, ages

old, so old not even an ash-furred coal

glows from the parsed fire in my pale

flattened face.

The sleepless night

rustles with husks and remains;

a coyote stutters his hunger 

to the planked stars

and here where all things pass,

long sleep comes down the grass
where I wait

invisible and surprised

as a white bird

in October snow.

~October/November 2016

for Brendan at real toads 

from a still, white place

 






Images: House in Snow, 1890-94, by John Henry Twatcham
White Birds in Snow, by Ohara Koson
Public domain.

Witch Of Tides

Witch Of Tides

I.

I cannot be

the Witch of Tides

with her greenalive

and mutable eyes

with her wavefoam curls

her saline sighs,

but only the constant

Crone of death's dust

where all things fall

because they must

when they've bled out to nothing

their sweet salt blood.

We meet in that place

neither sea nor shore;

the liminal wing, the liquidless pour

not wave nor field nor barren waste,

only a dead god's breathing face

on which we stand, the Witch and I

where three winds vie

to make the storm of rattle and fly

where the veil is rent,

where One and the Other

can mingle unkempt.

I cannot be

the Witch of Tides

whose toy is life

whose palette is clouds

whose hand is so wet,

but only the Crone of a

soft and dry

and whimsical

death.

II

Yet her blackened

inversion am I,
with my sandy surf
of dead glass and dry,

pushed and flung
like a moving eye,

tho the sweat it brings

is its only salt

except alkali.

We both have our wrecks

of sphinxes and ships,
of stones and decks,

of cities buried

with a murderer's care

for privacy to the ones we hide

shrouded in the swirl of our hair

as their world dies;

and who is to say

of the wet or the dry,

which was the Maiden

which was the Bride,
the constant Crone

or the wild Witch of Tides?

~October 2015

Top Image via internet; author unknown. Manipulated. No copyright infringement intended.
Great Sphinx and Pyramids, circa 1890 via wikimedia commons
Manipulated. Shared under a Creative Commons License

The Fickle Selkie

 

The Fickle Selkie

You came in on the wave

you left on,

dripping sleek and strong 

your secrets wearied in the foam.

You opened wide

your kelp drift eyes 

so I could see 

timelessly

the sea you plowed so long

 without a harvest

richer than sing-song.

We waltzed the wrecks

on dead men's bones,

and of 

the everything we found
we carried
nothing home.

I should have known

you'd leave as quick

as sea fret wrack

without a sound.

You are

nothing to me now---

your joys or griefs,

your warmth that fades

in the windy days

of a landsman's chill,

nothing at all of sea or land

less than the

 fine dust that seeps a sand

between lid and eye

to stab each blink,

an almost-nothing soon gone
in the rub of tears.

You are

nothing to me now

nothing, 

nothing at all--

no scrimshaw kiss

no oceanic salt-lick--

only a bit of bric-

a-brac decor,

the mounted skull

beside the door

of some strayed herbivore

who met its end in heat and thirst,

bleached and white and empty-eyed,

ant-cleaned of all the tasty worst.

Outside the walls

I cannot hear

the wave that crashes on

 your name
circling spray 

in wraithlike wreaths

around my lambent chimney tor, 

the smoke of cedars
 upward taking blind

into nothing

the burn of the soft wet skin
you left behind.

~September, 2015 

"Selkies ...are mythological creatures found in Scottish, Irish, [Icelandic] and Faroese folklore... Selkies are said to live as seals in the sea but shed their skin to become human on land."

~wikipedia

Image: Näcken (The Water Sprite), 1882 by Ernst Josephson, public domain via wikimedia commons