Summer Solstice 2011

Summer Solstice 2011 - a reading (on YouTube)

Sunrise, sunset. The day is here, the day is gone.

Summer and winter are inextricably intertwined. Like mating black snakes in a caduceus, they cross at every solstice. Sunrise on the summer solstice aligns to sunset on the first day of winter, just as summer's sunset lines up with winter's dawn. Between those twin poles, time ambles like the river running from the land of the living to the world of the dead. Its wide, unrippled mirror reflects approaching storms in blue and gray and white.

As I tread along the path beside, a mockingbird marks my passage, scalloping from post to post along a fence, always one step ahead, a taunt or a reminder, of what I am unsure. A woodpecker peers from a keyhole in time-hardened tree trunk, then retreats into its sanctuary. A flutter of crows calls back and forth across a dapple-shaded canopy, harbingers of winter tidings as yet unforeseen. Their dark conversations are as brief as summer showers, all traces evaporate beneath the resurgent sun.

Deep within the faerie wood, dawn belatedly flickers through the leaves concealing the horizon to liberate the sleeping giants from the long, sweet siege of night. The fire-stricken kings crash to their knees, their arboreal crowns shattering as they fall. A host of golden-green usurpers sprout from their sun-dispelled shadows, in want of regents as they strive to reclaim their ancient, ancestral lands.

As I wander from morning toward a deeply shadowed afternoon, time creeps forward on padded feet, unnoticed, like vines entwined across a brushfire clearing, like grass subduing the stain a midden mound or a cemetery hill, until it gently covers all.

Sunrise, sunset. The day is here, the night is come.

© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III

Spring Equinox 2011

Spring Equinox 2011 - a reading (on YouTube)

A crow sits atop a signpost, harbinger of the naked power grab occurring in the springtide court. His companion drinks from a muddy, roadside pool. On bolder days, he station-keeps in midair beyond the light pole, battling a strong south wind to a standstill. He tucks his wings, hovers and peels off back to perch before stepping into the wind again. Nearby, his mate calls her prophetically phrased monitions.

No one pays attention to her harshly worded warnings. The madding mob prefers the melodic cooing of mourning doves or onomatopoetic calls of the whippoorwills crying through the night, not recognizing the ominous note of either. Now is the time of the green plague. The last of the old, brown leaves have been discarded, pushed out by the green and new. An orgy of pollen sows confusion through the land. With each unrelenting gust of wind, golden storm clouds gather beneath every oak and pine.

A hawk glides low and silent through the front garden, a dead dove clutched in its talons. As her raptor-sisters patrol above, a woodpecker circles a tree as a shield then abandons her half-constructed nesting hole to return when the skies are clearer. Garden predators prowl unhindered in a triple-witching of instinct, occupation and feigned domestication. Quick, sharp claws lurk beneath their soft gray paws.

At night, two steady stars like uneven eyes, one heavy-lidded, peer back from the dark horizon. The old god and his messenger steal glimpses of their former demesne. The aged face of the winter solstice melts away as her younger sister begins to blossom. Soon, too, her shine will fade and we will flee back into the arms of her jealous, pale white twin. By then, the summer sacrifices will have been gathered, stirring restlessly within the wicker man, certain of their fate.

Behind a screen of purple Persian shields, azaleas bloom pink and white and red. Lavender lantana pop in tiny clusters that form a fuller flower, crawling down the stalks like tiny Roman legions whose whole is accentuated by the congregated discipline of its parts. The first brace of yellow alamanda trumpets the coronation of the radiant maiden-princess who has finally overthrown the cruel ice queen. By Lughnasa, they will blast martial in oppression as she, too, will be named a tyrant and usurper.

Camped in their winter bivouacs before the spring campaign, her green-jacked soldiers share cold coffee and dream of returning home to kiss their wives goodbye. Ignorant that they'll end their days blind and toothless, they still believe their cause is just and their vengeance justified. Until the scales of war tumble from their eyes, they dose in the warmth of the maiden's brilliant smile, blinded by visions of her fast maturing beauty, praying that her brightly colored revolution will never meet its end.

© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III

Imbolc 2011

Imbolc 2011 - a reading (on YouTube)

At Imbolc, the Iron Queen remains enthroned in the underworld. In the world of men, the Corn Mother's grief casts a pale pall across the land. Pure, white, sparkling tears drift softly down her face, clinging to the ground as a memorial as her desperate search continues. The frozen landscape mirrors her lamentation. She wanders the wood instead of fertile fields. Bare branches form the lacework of her mourning veil.

Perched like slices of a moonless night among the barren trees, a chorus of crows cruelly cries a coronach for the Rape of Prosperina. In their underground lairs, bears and badgers stir, presaging her triumphal return. Until that hallowed day, harts shelter in sylvan glades and glens, their flanks turned against her mother's chilling wails of gloom. Coyotes prowl the gardens unhindered, leaving only pawprints in the snow.

In secret passageways beneath the earth, a chthonic entourage awakens. Sprites and faeries don chartreuse and silver to celebrate the return to light of the Majestic Queen of Shades. Her remaining curses will go undelivered until Samhain. For a short, bright season, the dead rest peacefully in their graves.

Soon her runners will spring forth, scattering crocuses and snowdrops along her processional, carpeting it imperial and virgin white. Little do they know her innocence is no longer Orphean, forever stained by Eurydice's blood.

In the valleys of Goidelic mountains, deep among the holly and the yew, Green Men laugh as the petty, deific drama plays out again this year. In the fields and folds and sheltered byres, young mothers pay no mind. Their lambs dance and kick within warm, winter wombs, dreaming of the verdant, Elysian fields that will greet them when they emerge.

Huddled in mead halls, young warriors while away the winter days honing weapons to an icy sheen against the impending thaw. While dozing by the fire, old men harvest memories of long lost maidens like poppies entangled with the barley in the fall.

© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III

Summer Solstice 2009

Summer Solstice 2009 - a reading (on YouTube)

Shadows slant from north to south as the sun continues its annual progress, a celestial pilgrimage through this sublunary realm.

The morning whispers in pearl white velvet as shadow cardinals dance behind the blinds. Outside, a knot of butterflies chase through the grass like a cloud of mischievous faeries playing tag on the wing. From ground level the lawn looks like a jungle, the ants a distant tribe of hunters pursuing their quarry high into the canopy. Elite arachnids in bright green and orange uniforms parachute down upon unsuspecting prey. Tiny wrens twitter warnings against each intruder lurking behind the morning leaves.

Suddenly, a gray stillness descends as though the world outside has paused for breath. Thunderheads obscure the horizon. Stormbound light casts long, double shadows directly south. The sky grumbles in strobed slow-motion with unheralded flashes of freeze-frame anger that capture the world in thunderously burning violet. Raindrops ripple and shatter the world's reflection in the mirror of an ancient pond.

Green leaves glow against a slate of purple clouds as the downpour trickles away into torrents of slanted sunshine. An indigo silhouette swoops in below the rooftops, an iridescent shadow with an offering of bread rinds it sacrifices at the hanging pool. At the bottom of that restless, rippled basin, in a spot of sunlight no larger than a silver dollar, a thousand summer dreams swim free.

As the sun melts and runs into an orange lake, a lavender sky oozes through the trees as evening slowly slips toward night. Beyond the field of twinkling, midsummer lights, the voices of the dead call as whippoorwills, a reminder that this time is brief and must not be forgotten.


© 2009 Edward P. Morgan III

Summer Solsitce 2008

Bright red cardinals engage gray and white mockingbirds in a territorial war, each flicking from tree to wire, singing out their borders with madrigals of battle. A colony of jays erupts in a riot of shrieking blue until a vestal white egret stalks innocently from their lair. Ospreys haunt an aerial highway concealed below a canopy of adjacent trees and homes as they hunt the margins between more bountiful lakes. A dusky heron stands in water as still as the reeds concealing him while fingerling fish dart between his legs unaware of the danger until his yellow bill flashes like lightning from a clear, blue sky.

An opalescent halo shines through brush-stroke clouds, masking yet defining the sun reflected on the water like a sheet of hammered gold, lighting the hazy horizon like a candle in the fog. As the neon mist disperses, the sun sets a bush ablaze in the spaces between its leaves, like an omen or promise. Or a voice.

The full moon precedes the solstice by two full nights, a waning prophecy diffusing the shadows with its soft, continuous light.

A night breeze climbs a spider strand in a shaft of reflected light, like a violin being tuned to the perfect pitch of the starry sky. A tandem of creeping meteors tracks across the darkness, watchfires from distant outposts, flickering reminders that our farthest colonies remain intact.

A pair of crows disrupts the moonlight, the precursors to a murder, large, indigo and iridescent. One splashes in the stone basin while her mate picks at the lavender flowers of the myrtle to which it's chained. Thought and Memory, All Father's ever present eyes and ears, taunting me, laughing at my troubles. I echo their laughter back at them, the mingled sound of joy combating the sorrows of this life.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Imbolc 2008

We arrive at the feast of St. Brigid, midway through the darkest portion of the year. A final celebration of winter before our minds turn toward the first campaigns of spring. We have healed from setbacks of the fall and now repair our equipment as the skalds and bards inspire us toward fresh glory with their ballads.

By the lake, the water sparkles with a dreamlike clarity as though filled with sparks thrown from a blacksmith's anvil. A storm cloud of crows rises to shadow our eyes as their contentious laughter startles us from slumber. We wake to a proxy war between the Norns and Fates. The Wyrd Sisters spin their magic from the well of the world tree while the Crones weave spells into the scenes of their tapestry and prepare to unleash the Furies for grievances against this life or the last. We thought their battle was just a brushfire war until the flames set the trees alight.

I hope the crows do not look down before reporting back to their mistresses as I think they would discover a salient, a small peninsula extending from our lines. Though we have fortified our position, I fear it may soon become untenable, a Maginot Line easily circumvented despite the fortune we have spent reinforcing it. Dark forces stalk between the brooding trees of the impassable and ancient forest that anchors our left flank, threatening to leave us an island amid a hostile sea should they find their way to the fields beyond.

We dream of conquests and counter-marches as we retreat toward our mountain strongholds to ride out this winter storm. Once the passes clear, we vow to unfurl our banners and raise the horns of war, reclaiming our destiny from such godlings and lesser men. I fear our gains will resemble the first footfalls on the last snows of winter, strikingly beautiful yet leaving no enduring impression.

Such are the dreams of Imbolc that lay restless within our minds as we sleep fitfully by the fire until winter melts into spring and the wind gives voice to the trees which whisper of brighter days to come.

© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Horizons

Hand in hand on the low, green point, we watch another day, another season, another year pass beyond the water to the west. As we await rebirth, we contemplate the skyline, the transition and the night. Where were we a year ago? Where will we be tomorrow? A tangled web of clouds lies clotted high in the fading light, a reflection of our unspoken thoughts.

Above the lake, a ribbon of crows swirls and flutters from horizon to horizon, mocking the darkness they fly before. A few double back into eddies, vortices of a dozen birds, before rejoining the stream meandering north and west as if defying the gravity of the flat, featureless plain below. Harbingers or prophecies, they will return at daybreak, leaving other birds to divine the night.

Mountains of fog loom against the horizon like a distant, shadowed ridgeline, gray silhouettes dividing a world of darkness from light.

Sunlight glints off a cloud edge like the thin blade of a bronze knife then sets the clouds smoldering like a wildfire sparked on the horizon. Molten gold pours through a skin of clouds cracked and fissured like crazed porcelain revealing the base, white earth beneath.

Behind the bank of broken fog a golden landscape lies half concealed. Soft, lighted hills and twinkling marshes bracket a glowing river winding toward a shining city in the distance with jeweled spires surrounding a central dome. A vision too bright to gaze upon for long, the vision of an afterlife. An instant of crystalline clarity before the vision fades in the afterglow, graying first to charcoal then to black. The afterimage is burned into our minds, returning like the nightingale whose songs will haunt our dreams.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III