Fairy Tale

 

 

 Fairy Tale

Princess Moonzumi and Prince Heart-of-Ash

were betrothed as children through a looking glass.

She never knew him. He never saw her,

just a shadow that moved in the mirror's blur.

Prince Heart-of-Ash learned bard song and sword,

to jest with a blade and kill with a word.

Princess Moonzumi went out every day

to dance with the Sidhe where the dogwoggles play

 

down in the mud, up in the scud,

around the green tree that sheds no blood.

She knew every fae in the wild dark wood

and they taught her to fear the evil in good.

 

Princess Moonzumi and Prince Heart-of-Ash

were married in autumn when the east winds thrash

as the leaves fell like fire on earth's mirror-face,

and they loved each other for a year and a day.

 

Then Prince Heart-of-Ash took his sharp bright blade

down to the wood where the dogwoggles played.

The princess died like a mouse in the leaves

for a lie in the heart only ash could believe.

 

 

September 2022

posted for earthweal's

Ekphrasis Earth

 

 

 

and 

 

 

 

dVerse Poets'

Poetics: The Good and the Evil

Sidhe/SHē/noun, plural noun: Sidhe: the fairy people of Irish folklore, said to live beneath the hills and often identified as the remnant of the ancient Tuatha Dé Danann.

Note: I wrote the seed of this poem while running a fever a few weeks ago, but the prompts shaped it to final form. Apologies if I have stretched the boundaries a bit on what was requested.

 

 

Images: Mammal in Leaves, author unknown, courtesy of earthweal   Fair Use

They went hand in hand in the country that smells of appleblossoms and honey,  © Arthur Rackham, Irish Fairy Tales

 Fair Use

The Scarecrow's Sister

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Scarecrow's Sister

(a 55)

 

 

The scarecrow's sister

feels the breath of November

scans the valentine of Winter

sees her brother surrender

his Eden again to Martinmas weather,

mocked in a cornfield

crestfallen with crows.

Tho his overcoat's empty

as her sentimental replay

of Romeo reborn,

she knows Spring will raise him

high on his stick

alive in the corn.

September, 2022

posted for

Word Garden Word List

and

earthweal's 

Open Link # 137

Images: In The Fields, Evening  © Jules Breton circa 1900   Public Domain

Pumpkinhead--Self Portrait © Jamie Wyeth, 1972  Fair Use

Lonely As A Dream

 

 

 

 

 

Lonely As A Dream

 

"Everything's a dream when you're alone."

~Wes Craven

 

 

If

you come through the door 

you see at once it's an old woman's house

smelling of apples, eucalyptus

and yellow books rhyming by size.

Nothing is new.

 

Incense

burns in the bedroom

for the sake of a man's memory

smoking and braiding in soft light

that slips through heavy drapes

like a thief. There is silence.

 

Peace

is there, and emptiness.

The ghost has learned to

keep to its corner, and seldom speaks to

the woman who gambles with words

in the hunger before dawn. 

She's

 the laugh no one hears

at  the midnight carnival,

the road no one takes

winding back on itself, the sprout 

light's pulled too thin, too tall

in its mirror, shadow.

Besides 

the dream, she knows only 

a sky flat with heat

that eats birds and rain,

a plague without cure

that stretches its dead skin

to infinity.

But 

everything passes. To all things come

this tension of maximums

just before the breaking

and the letting go.

 

 

 September 2022

posted for

Word Garden Word List

and earthweal's

Open Link #134

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Doorway © Suzanne Moxhay, All Rights Reserved   Fair Use

Dangerous Laisons, 1926,  © Rene Magritte  Fair Use