Two Samhain Candles

Samhain Candle

The dead
are
close tonight

I feel 

their lost-boy's breath

thru their party clothes.

They ask
pardon for

drunken nights,
lies'
glancing blows; that 

for the love we had
I somehow find 

 the decorated joy of

being kind;

for death does not erase

the blotted soul,

but lightens

the little sins 

that make us whole.

~October 2015

I have written a second 55 this morning, as I woke up thinking of my grandmother.
(Reading is, of course, optional.)

Lilac And Apples
for Clara

You gave
lilac, green apples,

sugared coffee and cream;

no screams, no disorder

ever-bendable conditions.

We snipped bits of saintpaulia

to lay down on the earth and

they'd bloom in a year

pink-purple, felt-smooth.

Your wealth was in flowers and in loving's full sum,

and mine in your arms where no bad thing might come.

~October 31, 2015 

posted for    real toads

Flash 55 Plus

Images:
Top: Stormlight, copyright joyannjones 2014
Footer: Saintpaulia and the fire of  the candle
creative commons license via wikimedia.com

The Cat in the Well~A Halloween Fantasia

It's here at last! Halloween, All Hallows, All Souls Day, The Day of the Dead, whatever you care to call it; my favorite holiday. To commemorate it, I repost this nice cozy horror poem, as I have every Halloween since it was first written, a little Verse Escape tradition. Enjoy!

The Cat in the Well

My name is not Odin (I forget my name) but I’ve lived

in the well for a mad moon’s making, alone with the roots,

the deep water oozing and lapping the bones’ sweet arch

that lifts my home, my tumulus a wet black mouth, alone

till the cat fell. My dying was long, my strength nearly gone

till the cat fell, till the cat came down the well.

Odin was a god (so I heard before this spell.) Death gave him back,
yet a well took him in, his eye for a drink from the frost giant’s blood

below Yggdrasil. I am not he, but a shrunken spriggan,

devil’s daughter, giants’ kin, hung here stranded in small skin

to guard what I can't spend when the faith gave way gave out gave in.

Even the dark forgets my names, forgets my games,

even the dark, till the one I played at with the fallen cat.

For when the cat fell, the light (so remote, so white) blazed

sudden, sure it could end the dead dream that crawls my veins

of a land where we once loomed large long gone;

because of that I let him live, alone of them all. He took my hands,

he took my tongue. He gave his eyes, I loth to stop what he’d begun.

He took my tongue the cat that fell, the cat come down the well.

So we climbed mossy walls (my cat tail lashing) dank with the muck

of an ancient thralling, slippery with uneaten grief, treasure slid wry,

each stone a stele for a life thrown away, each drop in the bucket red

until we came to the rim, and his amber eyes set in mine

began to shine, began to glow so all should know

the spirit cat was up from the well, with many another tale to tell;

the spirit cat that fell, the cat that came up from the well.

~October 26,2011

reposted October 31, 2015, slightly revised

Original notes:

I've mingled (or perhaps mangled) several different archetypes here: 

Odin, god of war, poetry,prophecy and magic in Norse myth traded his eye for a drink from Mimir's well, where the ancient wisdom of the frost giants was said to flow up from beneath the world tree Yggdrasil from the primordial void of Chaos. 

A spriggan is a mostly malevolent spirit from Cornish folklore, generally found guarding treasure in burial mounds or the like, believed to be small ghosts of an earlier race of giants. 

Cats, of course, were thought to be malignant, and often said to be familiars of witches or demons in medieval belief. Other cultures, such as the Ancient Egyptians, have held them sacred, and believed they possessed various magical qualities.

Special thanks to my son for the video he sent, which set me off on this particular trip, and to Brendan, for his input on the one-eyed god of the hanged.

Image: Cat on a Roof, by Ferdnando Botero, fair use via wikiart.org

Revenant

Revenant

 

 

 

The cool breath of the dead sighs down the hall.

It peels my soul like an old potato,

thick slices of skin and soft woody flesh

dropping in a spiral on the kitchen table of this

tired life.

A speaking shadow stands at the door,

an empty replicant.

A grey curse hangs over him

like the sullenness of unshed rain

blowing past a withering crop.

Huddled in the closed grave of my bed

I compose my bones in paleolithic repose

with dry flowers, an awl of horn,

a broken string of red beads 

       drifted with earth,

waiting for the ending of that next birth.

O I hear you out there,

rapping, knocking, calling

with a mute vibration

begging to come in and have me.

O I answered last time and see

See me now.

Roll the rock and stop the door.

Put the holy symbol round my neck.

Only keep

    the shadow

                  out.

~March 1991, reposted for the 2015 hallows of October

 

 

This poem feels very young to me now. October is also the anniversary month of Verse Escape, which turns 5 this year.

Illustration: The Vampire, by Philip Burne-Jones  (1861-1926)
Philip Burne-Jones [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Terrorium

(c) Lora Mitchell

The Terrorium
(transcription of a dream)

Behind dirty glass
the leaves are speckled

as an old man's hand,

yellowing veins, ropy stems.

A broken-backed rock

nailed in pain

at the shadows' end

is a cankered sling
for what crawls out at last

to preen and bask

with its blood-streaked eyes,

its drop-jaw mouth
engineered to split too wide

as it waits for its keeper

to bring the flies,

or sits fat and laps

at brain-colored worms

with a tongue

that's slit but still

 holds fast.

And it asks 

forever

no more than this:
to sit and swell,

to eat its fill
of all that crawls or
swims through filth

but
the box of glass

has grown too small,

the keeper's gone,

the thing's too huge,

the reptant tongue
too bent and long.

It lifts its head.

It jumps and falls
in a slime of jerks as

it scrabble-climbs

with its plague-toed feet
and bellied brine

up and back,
sideways and over,

quick and fell and hungry,

hungrier than ever.

~October 2015

Untitled, Zdislav Beksinksi

Images are the property of the copyright holders. No infringement intended.

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