November 27, 2016 - Standing

STANDING

While everything was silent and still

And I had surrendered

Because I was weak

One lone tree stood in salute

Watching

Not guarding

There were no guards left

We were defeated

We knew it

And He knew it

But still the tree stood in salute

I thought it would be cut down

For insolence

For arrogance

For defiance

But He seemed not to notice

It was a ruse

He knew

But He hoped we did not

So there it stood

In loyalty

In duty

In secret knowledge

It was just enough

Just barely

But then I stood, too

If I stayed down

It would be my own choice

If I stood

That, too, would be my own choice

If I were cut down

That would not change my choice

And He knew it.

November 20, 2016 - Dark Days

Ghosts are everywhere now.  Once we made fun of them by carving pumpkins into strange faces and placing candles within.  We stuffed scarecrows full of hay and leaves and tied them to poles.  We fabricated tombstones and placed them in our yards.  “Bring out your dead!  Bring out your dead!” the call went out.  Then the festivities began.  We mocked death.  We laughed at it.  The more grotesque we could carve our pumpkins, the funnier we thought it was.  It became a contest.  Death became a contest of who could mock the end the most.

Old and withered nests.

But the laughter is all gone now.  The false bravado we showed disappeared with the first wail of the banshee during the daytime.  No longer confined to the night, the harbingers of doom now wander during the filtered daylight, and all festivities have ended.  The Jack-o’-lanterns have shriveled and morphed with their facial features turning inward, like macabre dried and shrunken heads.  We need only place them upon tall pikes whose ends are buried in the Earth in the front of our yards to show our enemies what befalls those who would cross us.  Echoes of Vlad the Impaler.

The scarecrows, once plump and smiling at party guests, now lean over in twisted and tortured ways.  Death has come to life.  And every day, the ragged creatures seem to change their positions just a bit.  At first we thought it was just the wind, but the wind does not make bodies of straw reach out in menacing ways.  The wind does not cause hands of sharpened willow twigs to reach out and rake through our hair.  The wind does not cause the sneer on the faces of the soulless greeters.  No, something else is at work here.

Yet we knew it would happen, didn’t we?  That’s why we played the game in the first place.  We are not afraid, we told them.  But we lied.  We always lie.  It doesn’t matter now.  It’s not like we had a choice.  The King was cut down in the Fall.  The enemy has free reign, and even now we hear the Lord of Winter’s army approaching.  The drumbeats grow louder and incessant, and the Earth shakes with the hooves of thousands of black horses.  The day will come when we pray to have just the simple banshees again and an occasional murderous scarecrow.

These are the dark days.

November 13, 2016 - A Shift

Can you see him?  It requires a shift in perspective to see him, but can you do it?  Can you shift yourself from your “normal” expectations of what you think ought to be there and instead see what is there?  If you can, count yourself among the lucky.  And if you can see him and those like him without being told where to look, count yourself among the blessed who have the sight.  They see without the interface so necessary to most people.

One of the helpers.

He is out and about now in the dark half of the year, and there is no need to hide in the forest anymore.  The sun will not notice the tearing down of things now; he is far too weak.  This is the time when the Piper must be paid and the gold must be returned.  These are the beings who ensure it.  We might look the other way and tell ourselves that it’s all in our imagination.  We might tell ourselves that the gold is ours to keep forever.  We might pretend that this is not part of the bargain.  But in the end, we know we are wrong.  The accounting system is perfect.  The invoice is exact.  The reckoning is always near.

The old dam crumbles slowly and he helps it along.  Leaks have sprung everywhere, and most of us have forgotten the reason the dam was built in the first place.  Perhaps when it is finally destroyed we’ll remember again.  Maybe then we’ll come back and chase the destruction back into the forest.  Maybe we’ll build it back up strong and sure again, so certain in our knowledge, so haughty in our wrongly perceived ability to control the force of Water.  Maybe we’ll pretend that everything in the world just falls to chance, that there is no rhyme or reason.

But those who can see know the rhyme by heart.  It’s a simple one, like hopscotch to a child.  The rhythm is in their blood.  They hear it even when they do not want to.  They shift naturally from this state to that.  They know how things build up and they know how things are destroyed.  And they know why.  They know that out of nothing comes something and that the something always returns to its origin.  They know that the gold is held in a trust fund, and the beneficiary waits in the forest.  Still.

November 6, 2016 - The Summer Witch

THE SUMMER WITCH

It slipped through our fingers

the intoxicating elixir

we longed to hold

to keep

our own precious store

each one of us hid a veiled cache

a secret . . .

but it dripped away

as a summer rain

the heady fragrance

and soothing moisture

the red warmth

how we basked in plenty!

but she lied to us

and we begged her to do so

again and again, we begged for the lie

we wanted to believe her

to drink the secret potion

but it slipped away

through our grey and bony fingers

that we still stretch out

hardened as stone now

reaching and searching

looking for the Summer Witch