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

Green Summer Country

 

 

 

 

 

 

Green Summer Country

 

 

"The sea turned to plain land, the snow on the mountain disappeared. In my eyes thousands of years fade like dust yet my heart is as before...I thought I had forgotten, but I remember everything" ~unknown, from the Mandarin

 

 I walk there in dreams,

the old summer country,

nave of a worship

where ice dies to green fire,

where we tended the world tree

whose roots wrap around

the well of the word;

where we bound the Great Wolf

with the trust of a god

made one-handed,

in the time when the mistletoe

was too young to swear oaths.

I walk there now, with

snow spirits warmed

in green shadow,

where the deer

sigh and surrender

to the arrow and its prayer,

where the Great Serpent gentled

belts the water around the wide land,

waves married to shore.

 

Where to eat is to be blessed

to love is to be whole

to suffer is to gain wisdom,

where bees make our wine,

where every leaf

hides the saga of a king.

My feet

wander lost, my throat blisters

when I wake to the Serpent unloosed,

the sea spoiled and untied,

the Wolf's bite tearing the snow 

from the mountains. My eyes

hold the dust of a thousand years

yet my heart

is the same.

I thought I had forgotten this;

I've forgotten nothing.

June 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Dreaming In Green hosted by Sherry Marr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: The poem references figures from Norse mythology; Ygdrasil, Fenris,Jormungandr,Tyr, the story of Baldur. The transcribed quote at the header I heard last night while watching a serialized Chinese television drama.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: The Glenn, 1936, ©Maxfield Parrish  Public Domain

Jormangand, the World Serpent © Aleski Briclot  via internet Fair Use

 

Wildfire

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wildfire

 

 

 

Time is a wildfire loose in the willows

burning soft-stemmed boughs to hissing smoke.

Their weeping won't save them, or their green hearts,

nor the pleading of oxen, burnt out of their yokes.

It runs its red leg 'cross the suck of the slough

to harvest sheep's breath in its ragged pillows,

to garland the branch with burnt black buds.

Time is a wildfire loose in the willows.

Time races, time flies, time burns the bridges.

It eats church and saloon out of house and hope.

It's tongue licks the moonlight off the moon's mirror

and boils rainy hours to hissing smoke.

Time is a fire, time is a melting

that feeds on the whole and ashes the parts.

Time burns up May-brides into sere widows;

their weeping won't save them, or their green hearts.

And when black-cloud crows show to pick my bones

I'll say come, children come, and don't come slow.

Time's a quick flame, and we are its smoke.

Time was my harness; I'm soon out of its yoke.

April 2022

 

 

 

 posted for Fireblossom 

at The Sunday Muse:

Word Garden Word List #19:A.E.Housman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: This poem is in the cascade form(with a few liberties,) which I felt fit in with Housman's general style, tho since it has been invented since his time, of course he never used it.

 

 

 

Images; Landscape Of Ruins And Fires, 1914 © Felix Valloton, manipulated   Public Domain

Wheatfield With Crows, 1890. © Vincent Van Gogh  manipulated,     Public Domain

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

The Night Call

 

 

The Night Call

 

 

 

The woods are dark

and important with green, restless

with a pushing wind bruising the white

 petals of the moonflowers against

 

the walls of this house I never enter

that stands at the edge of the dream. I'm

not here to come in from the green dark alive

with a canticle of constellations and the wind strumming

 

 soft in the moon-colored strings of my hair but

sometimes I watch the wisp of a dead bishop

rigid in the doorway holding the lantern high

questioning the heretic hours, the faceless rain,

 

the expanse teeming with life between us

that answers in crickets and owl song

and the giving language of pines

he will never be able to speak.

 

None of these will tell the secret; that I'm here,

 that I'll never come in

to the house filled with traps,

whose convenience of hot and cold

 

running happiness has leaked

out in sickly anger, leaving that stink

of broken love that clings

to a dead wisp calling,

 

calling me back to black dreams

I'll never share again.

I'm already gone in the breathy night,

into the green dark, alive.

 

 February 2022

posted for earthweal's

Wild Mind

 

Photos © joyannjones 2-27-2014, manipulated

 

Observed In The Wild

 

 

 

 

Observed In The Wild

 

 

 

 

I found you first in the green evening

a secret burn of elongated lines

sketched into the mural of bending pines

by wind's unseen ink, traveling the trail

on an old scent caught in the bracken;

then the adrenaline snap

of your head my way.

You called me from my campfire

to answer the brown beg in your eye,

to fall beneath you like aspen leaves

at your season's yellow turn,

as my own summer died around me.

Pulled like gut to the crescent bow

of the reckless huntress, I chased you

through evergreen shadow, along bone-clean

clattered rockfall, dry creeks where

only the musk smell of hope drew me on

past the deadfalls and I would guess at your way

by the arrowhead and adder's mouth rising

in your wake. Too many years you ran ahead

to pleasure a dozen others who never

saw your winter,

but often when the itch was unbearable in

the time-crack of April's acid sun, you

came to me in the clearing, to rub the felt

from your horns on my shoulder and moan

my name like a sacrifice

low and heavy as the white bull

of Poseidon knee deep in the

sacred wave before the knife.

 February 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for earthweal's

Green Fire

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes: Arrowhead (Sagittaria Latifolia) and the wild orchid known as green adder's mouth(Malaxis unifolia) are common North American wildflowers. Pardon the mixed metaphors of stag and bull which in time-honored fashion I ascribe to poetic license.You can read a quick synopsis of the myth of King Minos, his wife, the white bull sent him by Poseidon, its pursuit by Heracles and its eventual sacrifice by Theseus here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Pine Forest II, 1901, © Gustav Klimt  Public Domain

Head of a Stag, 1634, © Diego Velazquez     Public Domain