songlines

in the old days,
everyone danced together
the young men leaping,
the maidens swirling,
the old men and women swaying and
waving their hands like shamans,
like birds,
like branches,
like witches.
the young had the power of creating new life,
the power to bring it to birth,
the elders had the wisdom to nurture and teach.
everyone knew the steps
everyone had the magic
life was a circle of dance,
from childhood to courtship to coffin.

in the old days,
everyone sang
there were dancing songs,
working songs,
songs for children's games,
songs to lull to sleep,
songs to heal the sick,
songs to ease the dying,
teaching songs,
memory songs,
songs of praise,
songs of sorrow.
everyone knew the songs
everyone felt the magic
life was a circle of song,
from lullaby to love song to lament.

once we had the music
the magic
the meanings,
once we had eyes and ears
for the rune-songs of life,
the gleanings of years untold,
our kin all around us
in field and in fire,
in water and sky,
in fur and feather and scale
and stone and leaf, too,
and we sang
all the year through,
patterning time
yearning and eternal,

from baby to bride to baba.

a gift

a woman comes to you
flower crowned, bearing flowers,
and how should you greet
this offering?

nameless and naked
in the night,
a woman who might
just as likely
walk through the wood
with her hand resting
on a bear's back,
ambling in wordless peace
together

dressed in thin linen,
veiled in lace,
a woman who might
touch a face with
infinite tenderness,
and then pour the tea

stark in black wool,
hands full of mugwort
and artemisia
and regret,
a knife-edge smile,
unshed tears,
with a fox at her hem
and a crow faring before her

how well do you know her,
this woman
who is many women,
as they all are,
who comes to you now,
arrayed in flowers?

what precious, gentle thing
can you offer
in return?

totendanz

i have gathered the bones
of what was lost
and buried them, for safe-keeping
i have placed a bell
in a high place above
to ring their changes, weeping
i have sung their song
and danced their dance
in notes that burn and steps that cut
like fire, like knives
i live to give
voice to the silenced
and life to the dead
i live to make a pattern of bones
and stones and song
that lingers stinging in the throat
i carve runes
in the wise bark of trees
and feed them with my blood
i tread the patterns of stars
into the soil with my human feet
what is it i seek
with a burning in my belly
to bring to birth-
what is the worth of this work 

to bring life from the death about me-
what cobwebbed totem
claims me in dreams-
is what was lost
reclaimed, redeemed,

in this rough-shod, beaky love?

The Bone Woman

The Bone Woman, a story from the frozen lands...

Once upon a time, a young woman was thrown into the icy sea by her father. No one knows why this was done, whether just or unjust. After many, many years, what remained of her was still there, floating like coral beneath the waves, a thing of wrack and bone. One day, a man came fishing in his kayak and hooked the bone woman by a rib. When he pulled up his line, he was terrified to see her, a moving skeleton. He dropped the line at his feet, paddled desperately for shore, beached the kayak, and ran to his house. Still, tangled in the fishing lines that dragged behind him, she was there. In the house, he faced the pile of bones with terror and despair.

Then something changed. As he looked on the heap of her, he felt sorry, saddened by the tangles and disarray of her, by the life caught in death. Singing softly, as one would sing to soothe a child, he began to untangle bones from netting, ribs from hooks, legs from lines. Finally she lay there aligned, aright, on the cold floor. Suddenly weary, he looked toward his bed. But before he curled beneath his covers, he wrapped the bones in furs. It may seem a useless gesture, keeping the cold from a dead thing. But the soul speaks a strange language, conjuring sorrow from terror, and being from seeming.

As he slept, he dreamt of the bone woman, and wept. The bone woman saw the tears, or smelled the salt water gathered at the corner of his eye, and moved to taste it. A single tear slaked the thirst of who knows how many years, and she woke again to wanting life. Carefully, so carefully, never waking him, she borrowed his heart. With the beating heart drumming in her bony frame, she sang a new song. She sang herself back to being, sang flesh about the bones, sang back her breasts and organs, secret bits and bright eyes. She built blue-black hair and fine sinews, and rounded her belly and hips. Carefully, so carefully, she returned his heart. Then she slipped into his bed, fitting herself to his side.

They say that the fisherman and the bone woman went away together, and lived well, ever fed by creatures from the sea, who knows how long. A long time, forever, maybe. This is magic, after all.

There is a bone woman in all of us. Find your magic where you can.

outside in

rain is falling
snow is melting
some frozen sorrow thaws and shifts in me
outside is inside me
or my inside has escaped into the world.

all that mud
everything squishy and plashy and puddled
my heart like a frozen toad
opens one eye
sees the first green shoots piercing snow
thinks how brave
how foolish too.

be careful with what's left of my heart
my head, a canny old crow,
already is not your ally.

13 Ways of Looking at a Cracked Turd, or Exit Strategies Post Election 2016

1) PETA organizes "Operation Guinea Pig" to mock Trump's hairstyle and also to insinuate psychotropic drugs into his hair products...Faced with a relentless and apparently unstoppable onslaught to his vanity, exacerbated by the drugs' effects on his already tenuous mental processes, Trump's head explodes one morning. The entire operation was funded through the sale of bumper stickers in other countries that read: "My guinea pig is smarter than your President."

2) Steve Bannon's (mostly paid) gay lovers come out of the closet, releasing thousands of emails from him. Paul Ryan does a taunting dance in Congress, waving a briefcase of printed-out emails above his head, and shouting childish insults at Trump and Trump's current wife. Mike Pence has an apoplectic seizure and is rushed away to hospital, but dies en route because he refused treatment from a lesbian paramedic. Remaining Trump cabinet members "move farther down the bench", and ultimately lobby to impeach Trump "because stupid". David Duke commits suicide. No one weeps.

3) Vengeful Hillary supporters convince First Lady Melania to order all of her new clothing from their secretly selected group of fashion consultants, resulting in a wardrobe comprised entirely of couture pantsuits with coordinating Hermes head scarves. Even her lingerie consists of lace and mesh pantsuits. When Trump predictably protests her new style, she tells him, "You are not the boss of me, you big bully", strangles him with a handy head scarf, and is taken away shouting 

something about "moose and squirrel".

4) A battered blue phone-box, also known as a TARDIS, appears above Washington, D.C. Doctor Who must save us from ourselves. I hope someone films it for the holiday 2017 episode. 

5) Trump succumbs to a mysterious food-borne illness, later revealed to be accumulative arsenic poisoning via food sourced from a variety of food trucks: "Murderous Miguel's Tacos", "Halal Hijabi's Shwarma", "Capitol Hillel's Kosher  Killer Sandwiches", and "Malcom's XX Barbecue". Trump's minions admit that they failed to notice anything odd about the dodgy food truck names, saying, "It all sounds foreign to us."  

6) Joe Biden decides to take one for the team, and destroys Trump and the entire Cabinet with an arsenal of automatic weapons purchased whilst twitching, frothing at the mouth and shouting random obscenities.

7) The US and the UK agree to a ‘bigot exchange’; then argue over which country has to take more of them. In utter disgust, Queen Elizabeth reveals that she has terminal cancer, and straps on an explosives vest for her state visit with Trump. Her last words are reported to have been, “We are NOT amused, you intransigent buffoon.” 

8) Pussy Riot operatives secretly replace Trump with a crotch-sniffing, carpet-pissing, snappish circus dog wearing a mohair toupee. No one notices.

9) Viagra and Cialis stockholders and CEOs unite against the Trump regime over a catastrophic fall-off in prescriptions due to the collective depression’s effect on American libido. They force other members of the super-secret ‘Insane Autocrats’ Club’ to fund a coup against charter member Trump (coup code name :“Tiny Hands”) by threatening to cut off their own access to ED drugs and Botox. Kim Jong-Un’s contribution was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest.

10) Trump cracks open one morning and thousands of tiny but deadly alien invaders spill out of him, revealing his presidency to be an elaborate alien Trojan horse plot. They take over the world, tweeting effusively about their victories under the hashtag “#smallerbutsmarter”. World leaders trample each other to be first to welcome the new overlords, correctly observing that “things can only get better.”

11) “Vlad the Mad” Putin has Trump murdered by his own security forces over a private quarrel between them about “Who’s the fairest of them all?” He then has thousands of leaflets dropped on Washington, all bearing bare-chested photos of himself cavorting with tame bears. After a year or so of Trump, it doesn’t seem that weird anymore.

12) Thousands of overworked, underpaid, utterly exploited garment industry workers in various third world nations who were making Trump family product lines rise up in protest. Using funding from a number of nations’ covert ops agencies, they descend on Washington en masse, armed only with the safety pins on their lapels. After successfully agitating for a meeting with the President, their delegates rush up to trump and knock him to the floor, where they proceed to safety pin him to the carpet and call him names. He dies of sheer humiliation before security forces subdue his mostly female attackers, muttering, “nasty...nasty...nasty” as he expires. 

13) In an unprecedented scientific collaboration, hundreds of the world’s top researchers produce a working time machine. They use it to go back in time, accompanied by a team of Planned Parenthood clinicians, and sterilize Trump’s ancestors. Then they go to the year 1787, where they remove the Electoral College from Constitutional Convention documents. For good measure, they stop off in the year 2015 and kidnap all senior members of the DNC who pushed Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders as the Democratic candidate of choice. We all wake up one morning and rejoice.

sorry, not sorry

i am too old to apologise
for your shortcomings
anymore
if you are wrong
not just mistaken,
or unaware,
i'll let the score
stand. you may realise
that what we are becoming
is much more
about the song
of the forsaken,
and that i care
more about the size
of your core
values than a long-
winded, unawakened
puff of air.
you are the pause before
the drop. the prize
we seek is coming
and the door
it enters by is long
awaited. its making
was the prayer
of all the poor
and lost and wronged,
who, despite your hate, will rise.