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

Truth Of The Mouse

Truth of the Mouse

What they do to you

I dream they do to me.

The knives come out

the tubes go in

to the piece of meat

nameless, once sweet,

test tube tissue

over-scanned and analyzed

and the bugs are in

the bandages again.

The nurse can't come; 

 she's

double parked at the casino

where the chips come down

like needle rain

where the dealer's a junkie

because the rules broke again

and the mouse

that chews the truth

knows 

it's not safe to come out.

~January 2018

 

Images: Illustration from The Tale of Two Bad Mice, andThe Mice at Work Threading The Needle, by Beatrix Potter   Public Domain

The True Nature of Hermes Trismegistus

The True Nature of Hermes Trismegistus

Hermes Trismegistus

trimmed his beard into a taper

thinking silent he could caper

through Athena's steel-grey hair

and never wake her.

But that smile as she lay sleeping

showed plainly she was dreaming

his humors into being

a distillation furred and spliced:

her owlfood made from mice--

leaving mortals to discover

why one god eats another.

~August 2014, 

revised December 2015

posted for real toads

a bit of fluff for Hannah's Classical Elements

Image: Minerva, or Pallas Athena, Gustav Klimt, 1898 Public Domain via wikiart.org

The Tailor Mouse, 1902 by Beatrix Potter. Manipulated. Public domain via wikiart.org

 

The Kitchen Mouse

The Kitchen Mouse

You're in my dreams like mice in a kitchen

when the cooking's over, the cook

is sleeping, the stove is cold.

You make a skitter under the fire-crackle,

shadow warm,

at a noise
gone.

I hear you eat through sacks

and wrappings, small brighteyes;

working your delicate bones

behind blue-painted plates,

alive in the crumbs, stark
on the stones, always

hungry.

Everything's spoiled in the morning

where your dirty feet have

danced, but there's no poison

here, no baited iron jaw. Live
and let live, I say, for
in my kitchen I will have
no death.

~September 2013

posted for     real toads

Challenge: It's All About Place

The ever-sharp eye of the multi-talented Margaret Bednar saw some inspirational potential in a series of  exquisite historical miniature room exhibits at the Art Institute of Chicago, and  kindly brought back pictures for us(see link.) She has asked us to write about the kind of place they might be.

Process Note: No actual kitchens were infested in the research for this poem.

Photo by Margaret Bednar,  used with permission.
(To suit my theme, I have cropped and manipulated her original photo for the header here, so blame me not her for that.)