Sabbat

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sabbat

 

 

 

I saw the moon in the devil's eye

when October rode in on her horse of bone.

The night began to weave the sky

dark and darker, cold and high,

in deep black strands from a witch's comb.

The heart of a bird pierced on a knife

hides a ferric flute and a rusted ladle.

Her blue feathers dropping, her downy white,

leave her butterfly bones to the freeze in the night

while the moon shines bright in the devil's cradle.

Nine shadows come and then three more

to swing five times round the balefire's flare.

The wind robs the roof and opens the door,

puts a wet salt skin on the bedroom floor,

slips on a sorrow too old for despair.

Wash him with blood and dry him with silver.

Float him away on a lye-thick river.

Cross his red forehead with your gnostic brand

but the moon still shines from the devil's hand.

 

 

~October 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Word Garden Word List at

Shay's Word Garden 

where she asks us for a bit of rhyme this week

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Walpurgisnacht,© 1923 by Heinrich Kley  Public Domain

Skullshot © joyannjones

 

Hungry Ghosts And Thirsty Spirits

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hungry Ghosts And Thirsty Spirits

 

 

 

 

Nine snow-white candles to ward my bed

as the Hunter's Moon glares against my door.

 

Rowan and hyperion at foot and head

but your fetch is strong. I need much more.

Last night I could tell it would need to be fed.

I felt its cold lips that the flames couldn't kill

 

pressed on my skin like a waxen seal,

saw its stubbled neck scrawny, stretched and too real

as thirsting you came, crawling over the sill,

but the gods in their mercy allowed me one grace:

 

to never again have to see your face.

 

 

 

 

October 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for

Open Link Weekend at desperate poets

 (inspired by Night of the Desperate Dead)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process note: Rowan and Hyperion(St John's Wort) were said to be protective against evil spirits and witches and were often hung indoors or planted at the doorways of houses:

 

"The European rowan (Sorbus aucuparia) has a long tradition in European mythology and folklore. It was thought to be a magical tree and [to]give protection against malevolent beings.. It was said in England that this was the tree on which the Devil hanged his mother..British folklorists of the Victorian era reported the folk belief in apotropaic powers of the rowan-tree, in particular in the warding off of witches...Sir James Frazer (1890) reported such a tradition in Scotland, where the tree was often planted near a gate or front door. ~wikipedia

 

"The common name St John's wort comes from the fact that its flowers and buds were commonly harvested at the time of the Midsummer festival, which was later Christianized as St John's Feast Day on 24 June. It was believed that harvesting the flower at this time made its healing and magical powers more potent. The herb would be hung on house and stall doors on St John's Feast Day to ward off evil spirits and to safeguard against harm and sickness to people and livestock. ..Because of its supposed potency in warding off spirits, the plant was also known as fuga daemonum (loosely "demon-flight").."~wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Title unknown,  ©@coven of ceridwen via internet  Fair Use

La Mort: Mon ironie depasse toutes les autres! 1889 ©Odilon Redon   Public Domain

The Myrðaling

 

 

The Myrðaling
A Ghost Story

Cold across the portal

through the shadow of the veil

the child shivers before me,

wild-walking the mirk.

She's thin as she'd never been

when she lay there, left,
tiny feet kicking in a stiff skin wrap,
taller too than when her kicking stopped

alone in the bramble where the broken light fell

as the snow wound blue around her like smoke.

Now she can walk miles

through the night from the black

back corners of the winter that rides

before and after all things,
for she's passed the doored rock

to the slaughtering shadow

that splits the soft loam, where

she blows like a seed that won't be sown

but must be milled on the stone of years

with a river of bones floating on tears.

She opens her mouth

and sings like the plague

for a name of her own to give her a grave.

Take mine I say--it's all I have

for a night sister here in the dying year,
where we've gone too far

to turn around, where too soon
we'll eat the bread of the dead,
where spirit can weigh
as heavy as flesh when the veil thins away.

Then the moon-girl came out of her pale disguise;

I saw my twin smile, and close her eyes.

~October 2014

revised and reposted October 2023 for Night of the Desperate Dead

at desperate poets

Process notes: In Scandanavian folklore, a myrðaling, (from Old Norse, 'myrða,' murder) or more properly, myling, was the ghost of a child killed by its mother in infancy, usually  the child of an unmarried woman, or of a poor family unable to provide for it, abandoned in some unfrequented place and forced to walk the earth seeking burial. The myling might appear and reveal the acts of its killer in a song, or call out for a name, when the hearer could save the spirit by saying "take mine' so that it might then rest in consecrated ground, (as in this poem) or it might vengefully possess the living, jumping on their backs and forcing the victim to carry them to a graveyard, growing heavier with each step. You can read more in this wikipedia article.

Image: The Strawberry Girl, 1777, by Joshua Reynolds

Public domain via wikiart.org

I have manipulated this image.

 

Creature From The Black Saloon

 

 

 

 

 

 

Creature From The Black Saloon

 

 

His eyes are dead moons

that call up typhoons

where old sailors will die

on the devil's hot spoon,

dished up dressed in red for the Day of The Dead,

mouths whiskey wild and well off their heads.

 

He sparks a burned light

that cracks holes in the night,

calls witches to bonfires' sulfurous light

for the Dance in the dark, the Blood in the cup,

the black horns of the Beast

who will drink them all up.

 

His tongue drifts like quicklime

on a seasonless wind

in desires that die before they begin,

over the flesh that twitches and yearns

to dissolve into hexes the old gods that burn

just under the skin all mottled with runes;

I've met him. I've loved him

too long to refuse.

October 2023

posted for Creature Seeker at

desperate poets

Note; This may have been slightly influenced by attempting to watch Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem last night.

Images: Standing Figure, 1970 ©Nathan Oliveira  Fair Use

Dark Dancers ©Gina lacob   Fair Use

Lady Of Dead Leaves

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lady Of Dead Leaves

 

 

 

Beneath a dead leaf my love lies hidden

with a rose pearl and a starling's feather

where the dark forest unties Her ribbons

 

where night rides as black as robber's leather

with a bagful of moon's most starving hours

in a forest where leaves are falling forever,

 

whose balefires paint meteoric showers,

whose pale sprites teach old lovers to dance

and sew up their wounds with threads of flowers.

 

For grape never saw the wine She decants,

a vintage that ripens with dissolution

aged in a song, sealed with ash and chance.

 

Under the starlight's silver infusion

asleep as a bee in the fading thunder,

 which is volition and which illusion

 

when all that's left of life is to wonder

or lift the leaf that love is under.

 

 

 

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal

where I am pleased to host this week's challenge,

First Poems: Door to the Wilder Eye

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Fairy Dance, © Arthur Rackham    Public Domain

Spring Beauty © Andrew Wyeth         Fair Use

The Howl

 

 

 

The Howl

 

 

Deep into the night-abiding trees let free the howl

of my heart(that false doppelgänger, that unreliable narrator.)

Course it there, where darkness shakes down her hair,

fleet where the small hands of rain stroke my cheek

lightly,lightly, not so bitter as kisses, not so salt as tears,

til it comes to a stopping.

 

There's a fire panting to light up the hedgerows,

to make wilder things writhe from shadows bending,

those fetches the old gods make to beguile us dappling the void

the new ones provide, movement alone frantic with silence

save for crackle and spit and the skin drum's thud

that still beats in my wrist.

 

Each day dawns with feet cut off, limping,limping,

in the year-turning dark. Willow-wisps glow

in the grove of dancing,coming to draw the light

from the road, off to the flicker where worlds rub skins, 

to flames and fetches, to what's kindling now

where heartwood was riven, heat banked in

 

each unlit log is given to the season of time burning,

of leaves crumbling and forest dreaming the hand I'm holding, 

dreaming and singing in the sough where rain-wind 

ears the night. Can a child born to houses ever discern it

where all that runs in smoke and mist is changed

and confounded, rounded off without logic

 

to fire that howls in my skull

what it won't let me know;

it's my own fetch that's come

to dance in the hedgerow.

 

 

 

 

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Open Link Weekend #142

 

(and inspired by Brendan's Kindling in the Forest of Light and Shadow

Challenge)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Dancing Dryads, 1879, © Albert Pinkham Ryder  Public Domain

Wolves,(detail)  © Andrew Wyeth   Fair Use

St. Walpurga's Nightmare

 

 

 

St. Walpurga's Nightmare

(or, No Medicine For Melancholy)

Up on the hill where the blade never goes

skimpy clouds dangle like a phrase of bad prose,

with May Day's and Hallows' night stars locked in boxes,

up on the ghosts' hill with the little foxes

 

sits the old witch always stirring her pot

of bandages and sweet oils, scalding hot,

her dry smile a bleachmark on her tie-dyed skin;

she's only waiting for the crows to begin.

Give her a coin and she'll midwife next year

or recount the rest of your life for good beer

in her voice like a hatchet while her fingers stir

mockingbird's screech into kettle's blur.

What's in the cauldron you sainted crone?

"It's hope, she croons, the alphabet I own.

You can't live on it, though so many try,

but you can certainly die on it time after time

riding the Big Wheel on dandelion silk

sucking tobacco like the baby's milk,

drinking and thinking you'll go up and up

then crushed on the revolve like a styrofoam cup.

 

Before you learn what your body can do to you, you

think its a warm glass of wine poured out for you

but it soon cracks in the time-slip and shatters apart

like your broken heart, dear, your broken heart.

 

Before you see what hope does to the living

you think it's a wise thing, loving and healing,

not bitter and blinding, 

hiding the reminding 

of the shambling footsteps shuffling in back of you

of the behemoth ambling in one night for you

the only hope that turns out to be true:

he'll break all your bones, dear, and eat them, too."

 

But dreams can be merciful with their endings

whatever the bile-twisted gist of their sendings, 

for dawn took her words just as fast as she spoke 

and drowned them all in the lovesongs of crows.

October 2022

posted for Shay's

Word Garden Word List: Susie Clevinger,

a fine contemporary poet and friend

Note: I've taken a lot of liberties with the history of St. Walpurga, a medieval abbess known for Christianizing the heathen Franks, learned in healing, who was canonized for, among other things, the 'miraculous oil' that oozed out from her dead body, and whose saint's day was enthusiastically celebrated with bonfires for many years on May Day. Obviously, I have added All Hallows to her domain quite mendaciously. She was said to be the bane of evil spirits and witches, so I'm sure she is turning over in her grave at being combined with one here. Finally, apologies to the Rocky Horror Picture Show for stealing 'time-slip,' and thanks to Susie for the gift of her poetry all these years.

 

 

 

Images: Walpurgisnacht, 1923, © Heinrich Kley

Antlers with Crows, author unknown, via internet

Odin's Mead

 

 

 Odin's Mead

 I am not a jewel

fashioned for your collection

nor the paint-pot

for your ever-moving lips,

not the fertility

to your futility

not assumed erudition

to your chosen perdition.

I am not meant for

your wound of a mouth

bleeding hate-kindling for fire-hags

flaming sweet summer-country, 

not the heart-stake

vitriol will make,

not victory to be claimed

in a war too dirty to name.

 

I'm only the last

taste in the drinking horn

of some bright thing Other

a soft-foot step and fleet hand

pouring drunken snow

brewed by Ones who go

on spirit bones far stronger

but here walk free no longer.

 

I am only the bite

of the berry

dropping seeds from the bramble,

a tart taste in a season

of falling farewells,

a sapphire flicker

brief in the blue mirror,

 a gesturing ghost's fever

behind you forever;

 

a thrum too low to be clear

that only the silenced can hear. 

 

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Kindling From The Forest Of Light And Shadow

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: I've recounted this myth before, but briefly to recap, in Norse mythology, the Poetic Mead or Mead of Poetry is a magical beverage made from the murdered body of a being created from the gods' spit which sealed the truce of the Aesir-Vanir war, and was stolen from the  jötnar guarding it by Odin in eagle form, who spits it out into sacred  golden vessels for those chosen by the gods. Whoever drinks from these is given the gifts of poetry and knowledge, and is transformed into a skald and scholar. Odin also releases some of the mead in his droppings as he flies. This anyone can drink, and is called 'the rhymester's share." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: One of the golden horns of Gallehus, public domain

"The Gotlandic image stone Hammars (III). It is held to depict Odin in his eagle fetch (note the eagle's beard), Gunnlöð (holding the mead of poetry) and Suttungr." public domain