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.

Carnival Night

Carnival Night

You come for me

always on carnival night

after the bark of the midway stills.

We're not meant for the light.

Our act is all torches

juggled in shadows fooling

to the foolish, invisible by day.

Day is for hunting

working the marks

big guns and high flyers

after the tigers, the drilling of oil

the milling of coin, the candy-coated crowds

 mice in the grain to be

 poisoned again.

We bring the doves 

we bring the flutter

and sigh of their unexpected

wings, dazzling soft rockets

that burst from our hands,

born for last grace escapes

from an unseen cage.

We are announced

when evening turns dark,

when all that's left of the sun

is a dead tiger in the sand,

and a high-wire hawk

tricking the sky

in a blind noon. 

~April 2017

posted for Kerry's Picture Painting









Optional Musical Accompaniment 

"In history, we've painted pictures grim
the devil knows we may feel that way again
the big wind blows, so the tall grass bends
but as for you, don't push too hard my friend.."

Images: Carnival Evening, 1885, and The Tiger Hunt, 1895, by Henri Rousseau

Public Domain via wikiart.org

Known

Known

When you came,

airdancer mine,

I didn't know you.

In fact

I never knew you

til you'd gone on,

bending as I was

over endless unplanted earth

lifecrumbs scattered everywhere

scittering across waiting ground,

bricks of every color

walling me round.

I only caught 

a swirl of exploding atoms

watched you and your birds receding

tapdancing on wind.

That was when

I claimed you as

beloved,

because

 you promised nothing,

because 

you gave like a bramble

sweet in the thorn

so I could eat

that random life 

you carried,

ripened in killing frost.

~April 2017

Image: Landscape with Birds, 1940, ©Lucian Freud  Fair use via wikiart.org

Ember's Midwife

Ember's Midwife

Who is this bitch

but ember's midwife?

Mother of smoke over ash

though she may dress in pearl fog,

moonlight, bribe rain on smooth stones

to oversee the buttoning

of her crucibled corset,

it only covers the clockwork, 

belts in the fire that heats

her Stygian reduction

of breathing ringed growth

to a handful of charry lumps.

Who but this bitch puts

black stumps in green grass skirts,

firedanced from large

to small, wet to dead,

from something like this

to nothing like that.

With her maenad eyes

and her syrup of poppies trickling

down my throat 

as I burn in labor for

each puling day, she works

and twists, an impatient midwife

who plunges in quick bloody fingers,

pulling, turning the breechborn,

yanking the leg of the void.

~April 2017

linked to Bjorn's Physics

Images: Flaming Giraffe, © Salvador Dali
Chici y Perro, © Juan Carlos Castagnino
Fair Use

Moondog

Moondog

Moondog came,

barking wither-white;

turned things dead

with his rabid spit;

a year sickened gone.

Come in now

before we all break.

Hold me hard

while the howling brings

black hearts and blooms down.

~April 2017

for Magaly's Stillborn Sprouts 

  

Note: I have not only used Magaly's challenge, but a form she has invented, called Thinner Tanka. Classic tanka(in English) consists of 5 syllable-counted lines of 5-7-5-7-7. Her variation thins this down to 3-5-3-5-5, for a very crisp framework which I probably did not do justice to. I have chained my two wobbly attempts into one poem here.

Image: Frostburn, © joyannjones, March 2017

Moon Dog, 1975, © Rufino Tamayo, Fair use via wikiart.org