Sionnachaí

There is some violent creature within.
I am warning you.
I see it creeping in your shadow,
I see it in the mottles of your skin.

The one who is your hollow
who cools the hearth of home and
cuts your kin.

Be careful with those arrows,
that you loose around you
aloof to the consequence of your
words of poison.

Just so you know
the magpie wants your silver
she cares not for your soul.
You deign to think yourself smart,
yet the simple of truth
is too heavy for you to hold.

Learn to be humble.

Be respectful of the thunder.
Be gentle as the snow.
Should you cast your soul asunder
for ones who feed the flames of empty lust
and fans the fires of ego;
Then the demon that you nurture
is how you shall be known

That creature resides within you,
your mirror is the world.
You will see it gazing back
in the glint of every coin and
in the eyes of every girl.

Learn to be an Elder.
Do not succumb to whims.
One step forward,
three steps back
the dithering waltz
down some other’s track,
when your own true journey
is within.

Under the great wings of those black arches
I am the Angel shade.
The rolling call of judgement day
those ‘holy’ folk sought to muffle with my grace.

Still in my soul
I recall the white cloth,
the wrapping of the knots,
around my wrists, those gentle twists
of rough linen
binding me.

I recall the softness
of the humming priests,
the monks and holy freaks
as they washed my feet,
and blessed me.

I recall the rosewater
sprinkled on the other daughters
said to be born of celestial beings
crowned in wreaths of grief
of innocence breached
harked by the women’s keenings.

I recall the hot breath of the heifer
her right eye bulging
her hide high in quiver
as they cut deep
and she bled before me.

I recall that that the blood they did offer
spilled vermilion and tasted of copper
to the great granite altar
as though the blood that gushed forward
were of the priest,
and not of the heifer to offer.

I recall that my hair was long
and my dress pristine
as they stood serene
smiling benign with quartz-eyed clarity
and held the dagger aloft me.

I recall the bloody pedestal
where I stood impeccable
as the ravenous ghosts of the citadel
stood below
their hollow eyed gazes upon me.

I recall the endless inhale
the breath of a thousand infidels
wheezing as the blade caught my neck
and then as crimson spatter followed speck
salvation,
it gushed fresh from me.

Dear ‘holy’ ones
don’t forget,
you sent out your daughters to pay the debt
for the land that you did not respect,
for the tenets to which you did not commit.
How was it that you didn’t expect
that unwilling sacrifice bears no credit?

Gods are gods and greed is greed
the innocent cannot be spent to meet your needs
With your blade you parade divinity
still though you can expect no saviour
if you cannot see
it is your own cowardice
and ravenous apathy
what hath damned your destiny.

I am the dryad child
bloody knees and blackberries,
I am the dryad child that no one sees.
The Gatekeeper keeps his eye by me,
yet never looks directly.

I wonder;
‘Is he afraid to see the shine of tears lamplit
Shadows cast in the hollow chest of the child that cries?’
Is that why
the Gatekeeper keeps me alone, out in the wild?
Twisting round his great clattering hoop of keys,
the jangle of which above he pretends he cannot hear me
as I am mesmerized by
the shiny ring of keys that keep me locked me out of his city.

‘I am dying! I am dying!’ I cry.
The Gatekeeper looks me over and says;
‘By the corner of my eye you look a healthy child.
Go find your comfort in the wild.’
‘I am hungry and I am cold!’
‘Your belly is soft and you have nought gooseflesh but on your elbows’
‘I am lonesome and the wolves are bold…’
‘If you want a nest go ask the crows!’

‘Gatekeeper please, see me! See me!’
‘I’ve seen your sort a thousandfold,
you beg relentless for what you already stole.’
‘And what is that? I have nought at all!’

His eye flickered by my jaw, across my hair line,
while his finger thrust at me and then to the sky.

‘You took my vision, my way in the dark.
You pillaged the heavens and stole their spark.
You stole my heart and raked it on coals.
Strange empty ravenous child,
you took my love and devoured it whole.’

‘Gatekeeper when?
When did I beg and capture all that you say that I stole?’

‘The day you scrambled out from under a rose,
placed cool lips on my cheek and chased after the crows.
The day the ravens burst forth from the shadows
heaved up their hoods and plucked off your nose.

The day you wandered, skipped lighter than light down that stoney old road.
Said ‘Never to return!’ to me and this citadel.
Now I shall stay here forever and guard this threshold.
How dare you return bearing nothing but woes?
I have held light here forever while the night soaked my bones.
Go feed the ravens while I chase the crows.’

‘Gatekeeper I am sorry, I did not know…’
‘You keep your stride child on the path that you chose.
You will not be welcomed here until you are grown.
Even then who would have you?
You savage so ravenous for a home.
If any man let you, you’d build a house from his bones.’

‘Gatekeeper I’ll leave now. I’ll follow the road. I’m sorry to keep you , I was caught by your glow.’
‘Do what you do best child, pick up sticks and go.
There’s no place for you here, leave me alone.’

I child wandered singing soft hymns to soothe deep desperate sobs.
I child hopped over puddles and scoured the frogs.
‘Who among you knows me by name?’
But the frogfolk just puffed back to me a vacant gaze
cockled their echoes and so I wandered again.

I child walked among wolves,
yet as they ran I could not keep pace.
In their eyes I saw mine framed by the fur of their face.
I cried their cry, yet they scorned my laughter.
So I set to the road again and wandered thereafter.

Among horses I shivered and settled my fears.
They taught me to listen, they lent me their ears.

Next I met bears, digging up roots.
I shared with them blackberries and nibbled on shoots.
Their great paws on my shoulders
they showed me the sky;
‘at the tail of the sky bear is where your heart lies’

I asked for lessons in making a cave,
yet received no answer,
instead they spoke of surrender
and what it takes to be brave.
I asked them if I might winter in their dreaming dens
but they just thrust their snouts to the sky
and so I wandered again.

At the top of a mountain a woman stood wise.
The crags caught my rags, the thorns tore my thighs.
I crawled and I climbed, slid back through the mud.
The woman faced west and kept up her hood.
‘Are you coming or not?’
She spoke like the fox,
as I dragged my bruised body over the rocks.
‘I am here, I have found you! Grandmother mine!’

And as she turned to face me I found she had died.
Her face was a skull, yet her hands were fleshed
with porcelain skin.
Her embrace was a deep and dark
as the charcoal steaming mugwort ether
as the long night sets in.

I asked could she see me,
she spoke clear and light;
‘I see a woman, I see no dryad child.’

She gifted me remedies, medicines of flower and vine,
she gifted me melodies what untangled the briar.
She spoke through the river,
she spoke through the rain
she wrapped me in feverfew
clutched me like pursulane.

She spoke through the seasons,
the shift of the wind
She sang out a storm and
burst forth a thunderbolt
with the tilt of her chin.

Her cloak she spread on me without losing her own,
and the cloak sank within me to sinew my bones.

She spoke soft and gently and named me Catharsis.
She showed me the north star and called it Polaris.
She told me to follow, to see where it goes.
She told me my compass was at the end of my nose.

So I soared down from the mountain, aloft by my cloak.
I sang up a river and sang cross a moate.
I marched on the marshes,
and was hurried by does,
‘I am Catharsis and I shall have my nose!’

I walked to citadel’s great granite walls
I came to the gates again, I stood proud and tall
I called to the Gatekeeper and asked him his name.

This time
he looked in my eyes,
and I saw his shame.

An Elder said

‘How dare you mock the wolf?’
As we naive
sang her echo
to gather up those who went wandering.

Long ago
three hundred years
on this island
the price of a she-wolf’s head
was six pound of the British crown.
The fearful planters intimidated by the true sons and daughter of the countryside.
An Mac Tire
I cry for you; son of the wild.

Those strangers
shot the wolves
too proud not to be
the Apex predators.
The wolf mothers who managed the unknowable ways of Nature,
peppered with lead,
another inconvenience dealt with.

Those who came
in their hubris,
choosing the role of catalyst
stepped out of Harmony and into Hierarchy
and ripped open an abyss.

Those cowards,
in their affair with gold and cattle
sold out the drum and rattle
unsang the songs of Harmony.
They theorised of invisible hands in markets,
rather than dreaming the ways of the land
or weaving the cradle and basket.
Caught up
on the unholiness of the wilderness,
the endless noughts and crosses of oughts and exhaustive measures
to make sure they stay right up there,
with the ferocity of the predator,
that sees all Creation as fair game.

It’s so often I forget the names
of caterpillars, birds and weeds
and swear to myself that
reverence cannot become a memory
and is the howl a call
or a cry
of agony?
Of one who disappeared from our minds
Guardian of Our Wild
now romanticised
mythologised
seen only in the sanitised pages of story books
and the alien flickering of screens.

So now brothers and sisters
you tell me;
can we howl the wolf home with reverence?
Or first must we burst open with her cry
and call in holy
her feral song to keen?

I keep ritual.
I keep peace.
You had the buck skull in your old room, where you skulked the winter through and slowly faded from being, turned to sepia and blurry actions. Eventually you left, dragging yourself through.
and the skull did not go with you

I left it there, to gather dust and be nothing much. Not a sacred being or an ancestor, the remains of a relative that was taken young on the Wicklow mountains to the next life. Yet one night as I sat smoking in a bar, wondering how it was that I was never vital and that life felt like an advertisement for something I could not afford and thought was tacky anyway; the deer called me.

I had since moved from the abandoned garage, one Winter and a stunted Spring without heat, power or a hot water in the hellmouth of the swamping city had ripped me apart and sewn me back up, limp and vacant like a ragdoll on a pavement. The owner had threatened the squatted building and the rising insanity of living in endless liminality compelled me from the place, thick with memories, old arguments, pain and rage.

This night though, the deer called me back. I knew as I rose from where I was sitting that what came was greater than sentimentality. It was a call to the sacred order of things. So I returned to the three storey garage and entered your room and took the skull. I took the blanket you had brought me from Mexico also. The air of that place was putrid with shame. I won’t waste my words on it.

Since the time I sought the skull, he spent a while under the stairs, in a sack of soil. When at last I had a space to stay I set him on the altar. I began to heal him of the transgressions that us profane animals made against him. I set ablaze a paper sachet of mugwort on his crown and sat breathing in the smoke, so I might purge his dreams for him. I asked forgiveness for your sins. I asked forgiveness for my own with each act of recognition and reverence.

In a room of thirty others still identifying as youths, we received teachings from a man whose hair was beginning to gray.  When asked of many things he dismissed the questions, calling out their vanity and obsession with human ways. Once asked why it was that those who still practice reverence for all creation are those who carry the most devastation for plant and animal, culture and dreaming, he replied;

‘It is the deer that dies for us, so we may see what it is we have done to the forest.’

On the day of the longest eclipse in a century I sat with the deer skull and a birch tree grown in a box in the garage on a bus. With a friend we carried these things on the verge of the road. We thumbed a lift the rest of the way to a waterfall. We asked permission and sang songs for the birch tree that we planted next to a fallen Elder. We asked permission, and entered the holy space of the crashing waters. We asked permission and dipped our bodies in the freezing water that was dancing with the rain and spray. We asked permission before we shed what we would not longer carry and called our souls back to our bodies. We gave offerings of sweets to the trees. We gave offerings of songs to the luminous beings, the breath in our lungs and the soaked rich soil that was nourishing us through the tender skin on the arches of our feet. I gave offering of the deer skull, returned to the elements, no longer left a sad lament on an altar on a shelf in a suburban bedroom.

As I submerged my body holding the skull three times I spoke to the Great Mother whose song came from the cave to my left hand side. Shivering and naked I cried out and told her no more would I allow the deer to die to protect those who cannot love themselves from their own lies.

The day is coming and it is time for the truth to rise.

I told you there was a forest within me.
You never could handle the wild.

I remember
your body
and how as I brushed my lips
on the abalone shell
translucent
curvature of your
shoulders,
ribs
and hips;
I could taste the ocean.

Two days past
I walked on a beach of driftwood
and plastic
looking for worn glass
amongst the detritus
blue pieces favoured
‘mermaid tears’
a green shard smoothed down came home with me.

I wake up
and never seek you next to me
I never wanted love to be
about beds
and debts
and laundry.

Long since your absence
I have reflected and refracted hoping to find light
again.
Wherein it was not.
I am a shatter
hard bitten reality comes with a clatter
I smart
as I sit by with people who show me
honest affection
and flinch at each kind word they utter.
The thunderclap that winds me,
as the lead words drop in my stomach,
meant to be well wishes, sunk to wells of anxiety.

Today I tasted the the ocean
on my own lips
without you.

I remember your body,
yet
it seems I forget
your
cruelty
too quickly.

The jovial are the most lonely,
the chore of smiling in the supermarket,
the wander down the aisles.
I’d rather talk to strangers thank you
I’ve seen this cashier too many times.

I’d rather you not know me.
I walk the old trainline that I used to cycle frantically

Life is slower this year
Death is no longer just behind

I walk the loop around the little island with a friend named for an angel.
We sit and watch the rabbits while we remember the sad mistakes made by older generations
and the breeze gently lifts my skirt above my knees.

I stand in the garden and piss there when I think I won’t be caught.
I allow my hair to knot
I talk openly to the wood pigeons courting, gossiping at the one who’s eager,
confiding in the one who is coy.

The nettle and the milk thistle feel like my blood and body.
Their curt manner hides their medicines
Good for the liver
good for the gut.

They speak to me as older women,
scold me for my waning youth.
I ought to be moving on,
I ought to meet a man.

Instead I walk the paved over trainline
and speak to wood pigeons
lament the ways of history
and
pretend
that I do not miss you.

I suppose that’s what.
I was sitting at the edge of the concrete dock,
cooing
seeking soothing
for the dying all around me.

Under-dressed and
delirious in the strange and sluggish evenings
sleepless sweatful fretful bloodletting
this listless life we are dreaming
through,
sirens sifting out the weakest among you
snickering spirits lifting through the copper wires
the stars that dared refuse to hide their fires
are all burnt up a million miles from here.

I was alone.

As I often was.

As I often am.

Not that that’s a problem,
I am not really actually alone,
cos the speaks I am listening to are speaking to me of things to come
and in their cadence is the radiance of a divine equilibrium

and the sky, clearly
it’s full of ghosts
sometimes they’re just
skeletons dancing in sombreros.
Damsels kissing scarecrows.
Other shit that I pretend I can’t see so you won’t know.

I have wrapped on each finger the coil of the threads that I have undone
married to a web unwoven to be respun
The hairs on the back of my neck were being brushed up
by whispery fingers and I surrendered with the sun.

And the earth collapses into a red horizon.
And the bats come out of hiding.
Skim by me
saying ‘Katie,
what’s it like to never be alone?’

‘What’s it like to never be alone?’

‘What’s it like to never be alone?’

‘What’s it like to never be alone?’

‘What’s it like to never be alone?’

And a booming mouth opens in the water before me and says nothing,

until it says;

‘Just hurry up and go home’

On the concrete dock I swing my legs under my knees
lean forward
just before I throw the weight of me into simmering destiny
skyward I cast my eyes
to the tailbone of the little bear, whose daughter they say am I.
I answer the bats ‘do you know what? It’s fine.’
And I know
no one ever said it would be all ok,

and I guess I can be grateful that

at least no one ever lied.

I lace and relace my mother’s goulimine beads.
The ones that come from Morocco,
that she bought in the seventies.

The ones that my sister and I have argued over
since I was in my teens.

I watch the birds on the hawthorn tree in full bloom
from this new bedroom,
from this next place for me to
‘Rest’
or wrestle
with myself.

I watch myself cry
I  ask the mouth in mirror and the eyes
do I love too much?
So much that I die at dawn as though racked by the stretch from sun to horizon
and ask that it all end,
before it begins again.

Yet often the string of those beads,
the Amazigh made,
(the Free People the Arab raiders renamed),

wears thin.
Nearly snaps.

And I string them all again,
although I know the other name these beads go by
is ‘slave.’

The rose, the skull.

I wake face in the mug of a hanging dawn
last night’s dream today,
I recall from the haze

I wake like death and I am decay,
I feed the raven, bleach the lace, wilt the rose, crack the skull.

I am the woman you cast out for loving the darkness more than I could love your numbing grasp.
Your protector’s clasp, cuffed me to you,

Then moon by moon
I grew so wane that my skinny wrist slipped right through.

 

You forget this:
that when we met I was already wed;
to rich deep earth.

On the night of consummation
I crawled down the aisle through the earth clad in ash,
and to that most sinfully fecund love I shed my first blood.
and to that love I owe my first birth.
Of song and feet pounding down on soil,
the creatrix vibrations that wake the serpents coil

Sorry now that
You caught my eye
And on sweet ether I caught my breath, ripped open my chest and let out a cry,

This ecstatic life of one who lives wild.

It called you to me.

In the reckless savagery of passion,
and pain.
The lips bit bleeding with something that slips between enchantment and rage.

You came to tame.

In your arms I was nothing more than a willing hostage,
you could not allow me to be death as much as I am life.

It was all just a game though
seeing as
we both know
I would never ask for your permission.