The Briar Maid

 

 

 

 

 

 The Briar Maid

 

When I slip off this

rumpled dress and slide

down the gullet of time;

when I go, and it won't be long

no matter how long;

I want what they take

from the oven to lie

at the tangleroot feet of

the Briar Maid.

 

She is faceless, fierce, ever

green as her puncture-vine cloak

drawing blood at the touch;

though I pull her strangling hands

from oak and hackberry,

with her thorns she circles sanctuary.

Whatever is left that lives knows

she marks the line

past which Time may not go.

She stands guard, 

through cyclone wind,

drought, wildfire and freeze,

for grey squirrels' trees,

for greybrown birds 

fed fat on sunflower, blackberry

acorn and mulberry,for

peanut thieves, my blue bickering jays

and black satin crows;

 

box turtle and

blister-beetle know,

roving armadillo, red-tail hawk, butterfly

in his last piece of sky, prairie

grass and the snakes that swim it,

rat and king, garden, garter

and copper-headed,

each thing secure in its

small life to come and go.

 

 

All that really matters of her

holds safe underground

as will I, ash-soul in place,

faceless, fierce

to feed and to become 

with her in season

ward and warden of that space

that was my land, that was my heart,

that is the last try

for all that's been loved

too hard, too long,

too strong

to die.

October 2022

posted for earthweal's

Poetry of Becoming

For those who want to know her better, my original 2013 poem about The Briar Girl is here.

 

 

 

 

 

Photos © joyannjones

Black Apples

Black Apples

I was a daylight shadow,

a bride of drought

cast over the mounded world like

a prophecy of night,

living on dandelions and dead leaves

until you gave me,

sour and hard on the flat 

of your incubus palms,

a dozen black apples. Keep them,

you said, for a year. I only ask

that you throw the bones

far away from this dry country

from the death dance of wheat

the victory of locusts

the smoke of the Beast.

Disappear us too close

to the rifting abyss

where the wind's sullen heat

turns the Catherine wheel of change,

show me the hiss of

the scythe in the clouds,

the minarets folded in sand
whose pierced towers pour out

the last blood of solitude sung by
the owl. All our ghosts will join hands.

There's the crack of your laugh;

a ragged breath of earth

to bend and break the dead trees;

the witch-year's burnt up. You and the

drought have gone and I

sit tasting unmourned

the twelvefold sweetness of 

black apples of the storm.

March 2020 
This poem has been slightly revised since first posting.

posted for earthweal Open Link

and Shay's prompt at the Sunday Muse

Arkansas Black Apples

Catherine wheel:a firework that revolves on a pin, making a wheel of fire or sparks; pinwheel.

~dictionary.com

Images: Untitled photo, by Horst P Horst for Vogue Magazine, 1930   Public Domain

Arkansas Black Apples, ©sweetsandlife via Atlas Obscura   (see link)   Fair Use

Known

Known

When you came,

airdancer mine,

I didn't know you.

In fact

I never knew you

til you'd gone on,

bending as I was

over endless unplanted earth

lifecrumbs scattered everywhere

scittering across waiting ground,

bricks of every color

walling me round.

I only caught 

a swirl of exploding atoms

watched you and your birds receding

tapdancing on wind.

That was when

I claimed you as

beloved,

because

 you promised nothing,

because 

you gave like a bramble

sweet in the thorn

so I could eat

that random life 

you carried,

ripened in killing frost.

~April 2017

Image: Landscape with Birds, 1940, ©Lucian Freud  Fair use via wikiart.org