Sunday, November 27, 2016

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.


Sunday, November 20, 2016

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.

Sunday, November 13, 2016

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.

Sunday, November 6, 2016

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