Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
The Dusk hit her like a hand — the perpetual bruised light of the wastes pressing against her eyes after the cave’s absolute dark. She blinked heavy eyes against the light and groaned as she lifted her head to look at who had spoken.
Above her, on a flat stone at the mesa’s edge…
Dee.
(more…)time to lay my head
across cool ground and
watch the stone flames
flicker
black feathers fallen
and i lay here blanketed
under long lifetimes
of snow
weve gone to stone
to stone we go to
sit with trees all
alone, weve gone
to ground & gone
to home under the,
under the oak alone
blind weve gone
and also the blind to
see the winter winds
to dance the moon
under her skins
pale the endless
song.
Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
Somewhere in the dark, what was about to happen — simply began.
All attentions shifted. Hers. The crow’s. The women’s voices, too, surrendered to sudden silence while the air in the cave grew both damp and heavy, weighing her down with a new emerging wrongness rising from within the darkness. The space turned in on itself and the fresh scent of water turned to sour and stagnation.
It did not arrive. It was simply present, the way the water had been present before she found it — already there, belonging to the space, waiting for her perception to catch up with what the space already knew. Across the spring. Near it. The bioluminescence on the cave walls throwing its faint cerulean into the dark between them, and in that dark, a familiar shape pouring forth from shadow.
(more…)become the wode
be as sunspecked stone
a pond as the frozen
while antlers tied
at ribbons red...
i let turnings go
hearts carve to spades
wergeld flows to bone
our bloodstained hands
kiss press of oak
there is only knowing
when those everythings
have been known
it is of voluntary derangement
in the where of eyes suture eyes
and mouth fed on dirt from
under ash, bone and oak
dare you the wood at night?
past the broken homes and
vast underhalls gone to echo
where have their songs gone?
you only have to sit in
shadow to know and
we call it other
some bonds lack ropes
no chains nor jailer keys
a razor's liminal edge
betwixt a world and me
A rune poem, based on an Elder Futhark rune selected at random.
Today’s rune is nauthiz, which has a core meaning of “need”. Alternative translations have been “hardship” or “constraint”. Among other interpretations, nauthiz is seen as a indicative of a transition or transformation, a period of learning or strengthening of resilience, lacking, change, and impermanence — inclusive of other related concepts.
Please visit my Elder Futhark pages at sceadugenga.com for additional interpretations of the runes based on multiple references and personal reflection.
We haven’t sat for a while, them and I.
At first, it wasn’t for lack of trying. I would go to the usual place, sit down and wait for the fire to light itself. It remained stubbornly unlit. Without fire to draw them, nothing was drawn. I might have taken it upon myself to light the flames but, in the strange rules of the place when it comes to starting fires, I am entirely ignorant.
(more…)Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
The dark within was unsullied by Dusk. It stood apart from the twilight standing without.
The understanding was immediate and absolute. It came before her eyes drank in the faint bioluminescence rising from the stone walls beyond the entrance, casting a faint, ghostly cerulean into a dark that drank in light with a fullness. It came before the smell of water betrayed its location within the hollow space between the stone. The burden that rested on her neck since the shootout at the camp three or five days before, was simply absent. Not lifted. Gone — the yoke had never existed, never had been slung across her neck, never pushed her body to the ground.
It was in stillness that she stood just within the threshold dividing the entrance between the gloaming and this new, fresh darkness, letting the feeling wash over her in waves.
She crossed over in fullness.
(more…)
with eyes returning
to campfire's flickering
old grey relations welcome
back without performance
to sit without a word to say
sharp skull the tap
wake up wake up
he croaks today
A poem prompted by a randomly selected Elder Futhark rune.
Today’s rune is mannaz, a rune that translates to “man” in the sense of “humankind”. The rune is associated with family and the social order, and in trusting the intuitive process or seeing clearly — both from within and from without. Mannaz influences relationships of all kinds, including those of a romantic nature, and encourages compassion, for oneself as well as for others.
Please visit my Elder Futhark pages at sceadugenga.com for additional interpretations of the runes based on multiple references and personal reflection.