Fairy Tale Of The Moth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Fairy Tale Of The Moth

(a 55)

 

 

 

In the Amazon there's a moth
who lives by drinking the night-tears
of sleeping birds.

By day she's folded asleep
in deep green chambers where purple frogs
sweat pearls of poison.

If she dreams, it's only by accident.
At dawn the birds fly up, eyes
open for song, tears given

without intent or knowledge
as I give mine, silver life
to the mouths of memories.

 

March, 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted for WGWL at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process Note: Gorgone macarea is the moth referred to here, one of several species of Lepidoptera who pratice lachryphagy for survival.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image credits: Blue Morpho Butterfly, 1865 © Martin Johnson Heade 

Great Peacock Moth, 1889 © Vincent Van Gogh 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Song Of The Weavers

 

Song Of The Weavers

 

 

 

 

The Norns speak all they know

in pleaching and binding, in winding

on the spindle green thread from the Northlights,

white wool from the southern sugarmoon

as it sets in blood-orange dustfall.

 

Their rhythm curls out from

the tangleroot nest under the world tree

where they refresh the well

season to season, age to age, and all that was

and is to be is formed in their throats' call.

 

They have grown each feather

on the black raven's backs 

of thought and memory

and taken the Allfather's eye

for their balladry.

 

A hard hand makes a rock-hard life,

but their cloud-boned fingers can weave

hard lives into blooms made to jump up in sheaves

as velvet as rabbits, full-hearted sweet

as the last peach on the summertree.

 

They fire the wicker man's burn

and rain his ash into the fields

to weep for the rye

they will color again

in May's breath-dancing fly.

 

I only sit under the cooling stars

in the holiness of night with the 

owls' down floating, in the bright foundry of day

with the tongues of grass leaning

into the singing of their wild living cry.

 

 

 

 

March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Wild Language

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Three Norns, 1911, © Arthur Rackham    Public Domain

Northern Lights Over Iceland, author unknown, via internet  Fair Use

Floaters

 

 

 

 

 

 

Floaters

 

 

 

My eyes have

made small islands in their sea

that float between me

and what I want to be there,

all desired clear

but now obscured,

invisible for what they are,

and never heard.

Palm trees instead of paragraphs,

not faces, forms, but homemade rafts

drifting across a wavy film, not words,

but blind reality.

 

 November 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Meeting the Bar

at dVerse Poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Clouds In Finland, 1908 © Konrad Kryzanowski,  Public Domain

Boat, c.1918 © Salvador Dali   Public Domain