Mahakali's Kiss

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mahakali's Kiss

 

 

I'm told it rained on the day she was born,

a January Sunday on streets of snow

that melted away like the life she wore,

like time's black kiss, like a riot of crows.

She makes each thing with a blind innocence

that starts a smolder in a long-dry field

just to leave an ash that cannot rest

til love itself belongs to the dead.

So fill your mouths with her acid, boys,

that seems to taste as sweet as mead.

Fill your arms with her empty husk

whose midnight touch will make you bleed

and when lips rot and skin weeps red

remember her smile and the charm she said

to reap your heart in her willow bed

where she dies of cold as soon as she's fed.

 

 

 

December 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted for the Word Garden Word List 

at Shay's Word Garden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Process notes:  Mahakali means 'Great Kali,' and is the honorific title of the Hindu goddess of Time, Death and Liberation, Kali, whose name translates as "she who is black" or "she who is the ruler of time." wikipedia: "Mahakali, in Sanskrit, is etymologically the feminized variant of Mahakala or Great Time (which is interpreted also as Death). Mahakali...serves as the agent who allows the cosmic order to be restored.." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image: Goddess Mahakali, Delhi Museum via wikipedia   Public Domain

Mask Of Aphrodite

 

 

 

 

 

Mask Of Aphrodite

 

"There is no cure for love other than marriage." 

~Irish proverb 

 

 

Love's an old wolf who howls when she pleases,

her black lips drawn back in mock of a grin.

She's made me her meat for chancers and losers,

to open the locks and let anyone in.

 

Her yellow teeth are blunted with winters

but her fevers burn hot as melted brass.

Her eyes are flat-white as Attic marble

rolling behind Aphrodite's mask.

Her promises drift like leaves in October.

Her vows of fidelity make the stones laugh.

There's never been one she ever was true to

except the ones who died too fast.

Since I was that child who was used as a woman

since I was that woman who thinks like a child

I've run with her pack. The crows find my dinner;

there's a price to pay for being born wild.

I never whore for playthings or money

but three times it saved my life.

I never lie for the sake of loving,

only to play at being a wife.

I never was called to be a drunkard,

but I've ever been every drunkard's best friend,

to drop the mask when I see it coming;

 

the black-lipped snarling

bitter end.

September 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for Illicit Encounters

at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Wolves, © Andrew Wyeth

Head of Aphrodite, via Brittanica

 

 

 

 

 

 

Light

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Light

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have learned to live

for very little

to accept what shows however small

however inadequate

to sit with it in friendship

but there is still

 

something else.

There's a light I crave

that shapes mountains and willows,

a radiant mind flaring each morning open

though it paints its gold on all alike:

the long claw of the

 

promising horizon-smile,

the stiffness that

came into your arms

as you held me, the

little dark murderer's bird

who pecks the grains away.

 

It's still that light

sifting bees' wings

across sage to kindle the flowers,

lambent as slanting love itself

in earth's witchwild eyes as she holds

in her unprisoned prism'd heart

 

even us;

 

even our coarse

demanding

insatiable selves

she will teach the one word:

 

enough.

 

 

 

 

 July 2023 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for desperate desires

at desperate poets

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Cottonwoods III 1944, ©Georgia O'Keefe, 

The Thief 1996 ©Jamie Wyeth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Promises

 

 

 

Promises

 

 

 

 

 When I was first a woman,

a proto-woman, perhaps,

I fell into the sin

of promising.

 

A jumbled barter it was

of all I had, masks

and early roses and melodies

too simple to be songs

 

all, all underfoot in the

maudlin marsh of fool's dreaming

with braggarts croaking their

whisky throats like toads.

So, into the desert

hot and clean, clear and cold,

but there again I fell,

into the assassin's bed.

Every night I knew

his nerveless cunning,

slitting the throat of love

as I lay numb

listening to devils

laughing from the killing-stone,

waiting for your call to come

tenacious and startling-sweet 

 

on limpid air

as jasmine in the abattoir;

but in the blood-pool

only sticky silence.

Now that time has taken

all the gods and fools

that made me woman,

I see with a child's eye

grateful to be lone 

with meadow-wren and violets,

 promises of fairies, friend of

crows and stars.

 

 

 

November 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

Word Garden Word List: Stephen Crane

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Woman with Mask, artist unknown, via internet Fair Use

Faery and Kingfisher © Jean-Baptiste Monge   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

Gifting Of The Birds

 

 

 

 

 Gifting Of The Birds

They say a princess

will have the Fae come to her birth

to make her fate with augury for gifts,

but the peasant dreams in birds

 rainbowed as the sky, as sleek as night,

gathered round her cradle

with a liquid blackbird murmur

with two tumbling raven feathers

with six scarlet cardinal sins,

swarming seven snowy days

with all their gifts and curses, not sure

which to give her, some of this and some of that,

sum of love and losing, morning song

or evening silence, heart of grace,

tongue of willow, green mossflower, desert spine,

 

hard horse apples or sweet blood-oranges

of November moon, all or none of these

before they fly, on to the next accouchement. 

Still from time to time she sees them perching,

come back to check their work

cocking tiny heads aslant,

looking but not telling, never saying

more than a bird might say

about the time that's coming

when all gifts will be opened,

all the curses told.

What will you do at last, 

their bright eyes seem to wink,

with what we gave you,

before you can do no more?

 

 

 

 April 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for 

The Sunday Muse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Birds of Paradise, © Vincente Manansala  Fair Use

Bird in Spectacles, author unknown, via Sunday Muse   Fair Use

 

Crows In The Snow

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crows In The Snow

 

 

In the cold, in the silenced sun,

the eye reaches out

against the blind blizzard

for the heart of the rose.

 

In the fall of a dark feather

petals unfold

shed stark on the snow

in a blackness of crows.

 

Everything glittering

 comes to their eyes

as a clamor that heals;

gold light on the ice,

 

 

black feathers for blood ink,

 rosebuds from their beaks--

all dropped at my feet,

these bones in disguise.

March 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for earthweal's

Animal Poetry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Living antlers, artist unknown, via internet     Fair Use

Raven Steals The Sun, © Aaron Purcell     Fair Use

Two Crows Make A Zodiac

 

 

 

 

Two Crows Make A Zodiac

 

 

 

 

Winters at white dawn, before the first gaudy ransack of a

scold of jays, two crows come to her feeding cup.

They have no elfish hands to hold interwoven as otters 

do, to keep each other close on cold waters, but still

they float down on air as joint motif. Not one crow,

but two, for in any functional lexicon, the complete set

 

of meaningful units is not one. They eat a dozen peanuts

with the focus she applies eating her mistakes, but with

 

their own goblin squawk and savoring, a black-suited pair

laughing like undertakers on holiday, the charm of a child's

 

toys in their round eyes as they celebrate this meal,so much

more efficient than pecking through reticulated rubbish, so

 

much quicker than sieving crushed bladders or hearts tarry from

asphalt, than abrupt blare-interrupted flutters on the flat luck

 

of skunk or raccoon, where they must thrust their razor beaks 

like needles through black blood glitter, scrape hard bone

 

clean to sew lost life from ruined flesh to full feathers. They

are complete either way, but the woman has made it easier.

Two crows make their own zodiac, seven stars make Orion,

the time-twisted woman who sets out peanuts

 

makes a pageant in vapor, a blood-let of generosity,

a late arrival at sufficiency; for in any functional lexicon,

 

the complete set of meaningful units

is not one.

 

 

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

Shay's Word List #11:

Ted Hughes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This poem makes no attempt to capture  Hughes' style or Hughes' own vision of Crow and his journeys, that epic exploration of folk-tale and myth which rewards the reader's time with much more content and flourish than I could ever hope to muster. 

 

But when I think of Hughes, I think of Crow, and so, this poem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: For those interested, here is some background on Hughes' collection of poems exploring Crow:

 

After his wife Sylvia Plath's suicide, Hughes wrote nothing for three years. Then he began a work which was finally published as Crow:from the Life and Songs of Crow. As stated by the Ted Hughes Society, it "holds a uniquely important place in Hughes oeuvre.  It heralds the ambitious second phase of his work, lasting roughly from the late sixties to the late seventies, when he turned from direct engagement with the natural world to unified mythical narratives and sequences. It was his most controversial work: a stylistic experiment which abandoned many of the attractive features of his earlier work, and an ideological challenge to both Christianity and humanism..He looked back on the years of work on Crow as a time of imaginative freedom and creative energy, which he felt that he never subsequently recovered...."

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Crows in Winter, © N.C. Wyeth   Fair Use

Detail from Crow's Song © Andrea Kowch  generously accessible at her website Andrea Kowch Studios Blog  where you can and should see the entire painting.    Fair Use

The Feral Baby

 

 

 

 

The Feral Baby

 

 

In the dark 

before breakfast I dreamed

that the baby fell on its head. It wasn't

my fault. It just climbed up my shoulder

and jumped. I only borrowed it

because you made me. It wasn't mine.

I am not one for babies.

Nevertheless,

it cried, so I put it in my purse

for the gypsy. She offered to give it a casserole.

  (Or was that use it in a casserole?) I said,

"It doesn't like my purse, but it wouldn't like a

casserole any better." I'm not one for babies,

but I know that much.

 

Finally 

I took it back to you 

at the urban university lab. You put

 a ribbon on it, called it Jean, kissed it.

 It was fine then. I was tempted to

sneak it back to its mother, but

you'd turned her into a starling.

 

And that's how

she came to be my child. 

I'm not one for babies

until they learn how

to fly.

 

 

 

 January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for 

Shay's Word List #9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note: No babies were harmed in the production of this poem.

 

 

 

 

Images: Creeping baby doll, 1871   Public Domain

Starling Murmuration © Menno Shaefer    Fair Use

The Crow-Mother

 

 

The Crow-Mother

 (a triquain)

 

 

As a child

I knew a crow-woman.

She loved shiny things, breathy south wind

and tall corn, green in the field of desire. She

wore onyx feathers grieving the time

when she had real words, not

just for me, 

but for everyone. She

was friend to doves unable to mourn,

a lover of small clouds which could never give rain,

a mother of all misplaced things: keys

coins and rings, strings, lost girls

life passed by.

December 2021

posted for Fireblossom

at The Sunday Muse

Note: the triquain is a counted syllable form based on threes. It normally consists of seven lines, each line increasing in syllables by three to twelve, then decreasing again by three to the close. This is a triquain swirl, which is slightly different in containing 13 lines. (3 - 6 - 9 - 12 - 9 - 6 - 3 - 6 - 9 - 12 - 9 - 6 - 3).

 

 

Images: Crow Prince Charming, © Rene Magritte   Fair Use

Crow woman cosplay, via Sunday Muse   Fair Use