Last Quarter: Rites of new mourning

Hello. It's Friday.

I've written so much here already of the changing seasons — the changing of what the seasons are. I've wrung my hands over the way that winters are becoming warmer yet stormier, and the way that summers are growing longer and less like anything that our species used to revere about them. I've been afraid of summer turning to the true season of death, and I've been in grief for the Wheel.

In a way, I can never stop these feelings or let them ebb, because they are galvanizers. The land is calling me to it, and if that call comes painfully then it is because the land is sick. For myself and for the people whose ancestor I will become, I must reckon with impossible things, such as the way this part of autumn now feels — where I mourn the loss of light, but welcome the loss of heat, and what mourning I could have felt for that is turned to bittersweetness at winter's approach. I must learn to cherish more of what makes winter alive, not dead.

But I've written plenty of little essays to this effect already, and after I undergo yet another dark half of the year, I will likely have learned new things to try sharing in the same format when I'm ready. For this month's Last Quarter, by contrast, I want to try looking at these matters with unfiltered intuition, to make a hesitant offering to the coming dark through the weaving of words.

That is to say, I've written a poem — the first in a little while, and I don't know how often this will repeat itself in Salt for the Eclipse, since my usual leaning is to publish poetry under my legal identity — but I think I need to shift my language into poetic space for this next apocalyptic work.

So here the poem is.

Plague Chant

I.

The scourge was in their hands,
Lashed flesh, flayer and disemboweler,
Each scar scabbed but picked open again —
Examine our innards for the omens,
Look in, journeying fool turned back
At the threshold —
Don't go out! Don't go dancing!
Pray the contagion of kinship never takes ye —
Take up the scourge and bleed.

They thought it was the judgment,
And to they I add we, and in we I am myself,
Child of the fleabitten
Who had swellings like cancers
If a cancer could pass through touch —
O pristine angels of the scorched land,
Ye have no need for touch!
Cleanse yourselves baptismal,
Cast off the senses, there is nothing around ye,
Hail the bone not for itself but for what sloughed away,
Pure white, white bone, white horse —
From black death came the bleaching.

Now I walk where all colors ebb.
There is brightness but no hue.
There is shadow but no depth.

I have sung in plainchant of the cold cathedrals,
And sung in the tongue of perpetual empire.
I have wept at what the press printed,
And what was nailed to the door,
And the dog dissected while it lived,
And the land enclosed,
And the water poisoned,
And the sky choked,
And the bonds of all things broken to the atoms.
I must keen in the words of my mountains,
The melodies of my sea —
"Let my cry come unto thee!" wrote the bard
There beneath the ash, world-tree —
But that tongue was cut out,
And the forest was kept for the king's deer.

He was not the Sun King,
But he was a king's son,
An inheritance kept by written law —
Freezing, arresting,
Enshrining, recording,
"Forever," they promise,
When the old way had been turning,
Give each thing its time,
And wait.
Wait.

The leaves are falling,
Red once, gold and flame,
I remember —
A wind would sweep through September,
And together we would moan.

II.

I have bent for the scourge,
Which rests in thy hand,
My king, my love.
It rests in so many hands,
Used alone, a generation of virgins
Self-abusing when they could be coming,
Fucking, kissing, caressing.
"Touch me not! Go unto thy island.
I am on my own."
But I have bent for the scourge
Borne in the left hand,
And I found it through the stars.

Cold the night, and clear the beyond,
Far from the false fires I laid down,
Half-dead on soft grass,
My eyes a rabbit's turned to the Moon,
And then around her,
Star after star after star,
Not alone but joined by the dark unseeing —
"Stop looking!" I heard from my belly,
A fleshy mass of life growing in it,
Or that was my dream,
But it bade me stop looking:
Do not observe what can never be captured.
Touch what it creates, and commune.

The scourge traces my hide,
Wielded by another,
I cannot wield it,
Not for me — the bond must be anchored.
Keep the flesh, and tend it,
And eat it, and be bred.

III.

A world made in six days, killed in six centuries,
I have heard burning in six fires,
And waiting —
I am walking.

We are walking.

On backs and in baskets we carry the tools:
Woad and ochre, seed and honey,
Iron and silver, crystal and pearl,
The antlers of the hart,
The foot of the hare,
Staff of oak and crown of holly,
One foot in each solstice,
Black veils on our heads like hair cascading,
And torches in our hands, scourges of heat.
We reach the assembly stones,
Plunge the flickering into the basin of herbs,
Release the smoke,
Drink through our noses the gifts:
Mugwort, mullein,
And thyme, friend of funerals.

Our new bards have written the song,
Cracked voices take it up,
The cup is circled, it collects a little blood,
We are singing,
Singing in the smoke,
Promising this shall now be the only smoke,
Holy and sweet,
At times with other plants,
But holy.
Let us make no more smoke without the rite.

The scourges are in our hands,
My kindred,
And we are awakened, and we are dancing,
And our skin is on skin,
On wood, on water, on stone,
O beloveds, here there is no bone
But flesh waiting again,
And what shall we plant within?

Scourge me with the planting rake,
And let the rake pass some life by,
Not the all-sweeping broom,
And let my womb be ready —
Let the winter just be waiting,
A breath inward.

There is no time to beg our own forgiveness,
And we shall not be the givers —
Dance in this scourge, and receive.

I will be writing next week on the death positivity movement (the name of which I have odd feelings about), and after that will come a post for paid readers on matters both satanic and Dionysian. Thank you, meanwhile, for reading this week's experiment.