Five Poems by Richard Weaver

 

Callahan’s Irish Social Club

 
I’m off to play with my dog.
We’re going to the cemetery.

We go every day.
She’d chase the sun if I’d let her.

If she could chew the wind she would.

I swear, anyone can chase tail. But only a dog
can find happiness in a circle.

I wonder what it is about the cemetery
makes her want to run so much?

It’s not like we have somebody buried there.

 

Reptilian brain grammar

Is a lizard’s eye
more distant,
more determined
than the end of this
sentence? Would
its missing tail
mind for the moment,
posing as a comma?
 

 

Front Porch

When the front porch swing
sang against the wind in the shade,
we pushed its music higher and higher
towards the tongue-and-groove
pine ceiling, and higher still,
daring the eyelets to keep us
from crashing through
the ivied latticework behind
where yellow jackets nested
in green shaded safety.
Back and forth our legs pushed,
though the chain links protested
our collective light weight.  
We pushed as high as we dared,
my brothers and I, and then beyond
in the same swing where our grandparents
had courted.  We dreamt—
the green swing flew without us,
its metallic song rubbing against our ears.  
We pushed against its ageless light.
We pushed until the sky no longer
received our thin shadows.
 

 

A Tortoiseshell rabbit sits

in a homemade kitchen cage, curious about the daily smells:
bacon grease kept in an electric skillet until it overflows,
and the less interesting smells of canned vegetables or things
thawed and dumped without ceremony or seasoning into boiling
water, all causing its nose to hop. They were constants at least,
sometimes mildly variable, but unchewable, like the cage wire
but not its wood frame. Sweetie Pie the rabbit waits each day
for freedom time, a chance to roam the house, where walls
close around. She always hides under the far left end of the living
room couch, where it waits for a weight above to announce
her favourite has arrived. Where the linoleum floor feels good
against its teeth and the deep dark sound of springs descending
beckon from above. And scamper out she does from the muted
dark, and leap upward onto the lap of the Other who always sits
closest to the outside light, the door where the other world waits,
sometimes green, moist. Hop it would when happy around the
two-legged smaller others, but prefers being closer to the earth
listening to light emitting sounds as it waits for the springs to sound
above. This other who always tastes of salt and rubs its ears in amazing
ways. Later, when light had flared and died, it wakes to noises around
its hutch, it smells a darkness brewing, a deep, rich flavored one
it welcomes, knowing that soon it would be free and a warm dish
of brownish water would be its alone. Coffee. Almost as good as the
cold green icy mixture given each night, a small bowl of pistachio
nut ice cream. An earthly delight every rabbit surely dreams of.
 

 

A Cat sneezed at a large animal clinic

and immediately became a leper. Then a camel eructated its organs and was blessedly resurrected as a pillar of kosher salt and tri-colored peppers. When a dog tweeted, it was transmogrified into an obscene lowku: prayer. A goose replied cryptically in an online only literary magazine. A disgruntled maggot took to Facebook and savaged the goose who had mocked the tweeting dog who’d responded to the camel’s projectile vomit when it heard a rumor of a cat’s all-covering sneesynge. Soon Sprinklr dribbled, incontinent as a cloud with a weak bladder, and Squido inked out, Dudu responded in Mandarin Esperanto, and Kaboodle kicked its kit across the Net before Pinterest punted an avalanche of imagery, drowning servers on 5 continents, excluding Australia & Antarctica. Internet war was on. Global warming Climate change End times be damned.

Richard Weaver - Post-Covid, the author has returned as the writer-in-residence at the James Joyce Pub. Other recent pubs: conjunctions, Louisville Review, Southern Quarterly, Free State Review, Hollins Critic, Little Patuxent Review, Loch Raven Review, The Avenue, & New Orleans Review.

He’s the author of The Stars Undone (Duende Press, 1992), and wrote the libretto for a symphony, Of Sea and Stars (2005). Recently, his 175th prose poem was published. He was a finalist in the 2019 Dogwood Literary Prize in Poetry.

Two Creative Non-Fiction Essays by Margaret Kiernan

 

Essay-on- Love - Creative Non-Fiction

 

As I walk down the road I’m thinking about those Greeks, and their eight types of love.

I remember too that  I am of another age. Less scoped, freer.

One thing I agree with them, love is high frequency, not ever low. Traditional people may have viewed it as a one -on-one feeling state, without resistance.

I kick a stray stone off the road. Watch it lodge in a bunch of dead grasses. Alone, without any resistance. It is.

I watch a Kingfisher dip and dive from the blackthorn tree beside the staid canal. Flashing blue colour, intent on catching its supper.

Love is a state of being. Heart full in flow, receiving and giving.

Lived fully it will arrive at joy. I see it in the battered blue metal jug once used to fill blue-stone mix, into a copper drum. I watch it in Ox-eye daisies weaving in the sun haze

I hear it in the music of Yo-Yo Ma. Or a trumpet player in a jazz bar. It catches in my throat breathless, as I fight with tears that want to fall bitter-sweet.

Or a sunset spreading liquid gold, letting go the light, yearning, I swallow it too.

Or Venus rising as dusk evens-out the bare spots of land, blending.

If hate is hell surely love is Heaven.

Perceptions of Peace - Creative Non-Fiction Essay

New-Earth

 

What possibilities exist to share our planet more lovingly, and with each other?

The man on the street corner might say anything is possible. And it is true to say, things are possible, something always works. Does it work for every man and woman in humankind? There was a time perhaps, when it did. Before the before.

The binary highway of Left and Right thinking became established and used to organise society. A Colonial organiser’s dream. A perception of Otherness was created.

Elitism arrived as an aspect of reactionary ideology and, autocracy.

There had been the highway of ancient knowing, food and health knowledge, flora and fauna, original caretakers, oral truths and storytelling with myths, mutual governance. Solace, and learned solutions. Navigation by original caretakers. Indigenous sciences. Voiced for the tribe. By the tribe, the children were considered and protected. No guardian ad. litem needed.

The water tribes of Ecuador had enough savvy to keep the water flowing cleanly. But time brings change, transforms un-thought of situations and things. Before a moth becomes a butterfly, it is happy- out, I guess. It doesn’t know it will become an exotic butterfly.

Then international global autocratic organisations began to behave and operate like owners of the planet. Texaco came to south America, amongst other places. Other businesses arrived there too. Then  the voice of the people was not listened to and, eco-disasters that were beyond  horrific nightmares, happened.

There were river sludges, the trees cried, and natives died. But that is fore- telling. I must return to the past. Back to the calendar of the middle eighteen hundred.

That time, a change came. Selected families and oriented persons decided to create industries on a big scale. It coincided with worldwide white ascendency.

The natural fear of difference may have contributed. To a them and us division, or not. A colonial fascism on a binary path.

Elitism triumphed, and a new order created to last hundreds of years. Families became super-rich and beheld a sense of entitlement.

Powerful because of their cash. They could influence world events, politics, kings and queens, stock-markets trading, land-prices, territories, and outer space.

Even life?

Fortunes made by the few and shipped out.

Over time the system would become a neo-liberal arena with innovative technology and power. Capitalism in a spirit of fascism where trade unions tamed or bought out. The perception of “otherness” remaining, you were either an ally or a threat.

At the turn if the twenty first century there were rumbles of change in society. People on the street had appeared to have arrived at a knowing of discrepancies in the world. Clear eyed seeing of a worldwide ascendency of white nationalism and ultra-right-wing movements. A global financial collapse. Fascism was again evident and renewed. Polarity created a very heavy energy among the peoples, and they spoke about it. On the world-wide web, in the street and elsewhere.

Attitudes and behaviours were informing a different type of person. Who were these waking people? In the morning who was the Self they met. Did they love falling apple blossoms or horseradish sauce. Did Yo-Yo Ma fill a void?

They spoke of galactic beings and native sciences. The endless possibilities for solutions in health, education and, in the language of spirit, art, earth society. No business models, just selves and souls getting on together. Solace. Believing you are me and I am you.

No borders and therefore no passports. No dominant religions. The ecology of the earth and the individual being the same thing. Spirit and soul. Consciousness.

A living wage for each person. A home and time to talk to the trees and lie on the ground, earthing. Ancient places and sacred sites gathering the people to watch the stars. To the music of babbling brooks, the birds will sing. All in harmony of pulsing earth life.

To speak to the Venus star in a dew drenched morning and wait for her reply.

A famous man once said, “I have a dream.”

That a dream is sweet to hold. To bring alive.

Our dreaming so precious we dare to visualise. I have a dream of that peace too,

the endless springtime of hope giving way to summer.

Margaret Kiernan - nominated for Best of the Net in 2021, writes fiction, non-fiction essay, memoir, and poetry. She has had poetry and prose published in e-book, in anthology collections, and literary journals and magazines - including, Black-lion Press, Pendemic.ie journal-C19 collection , archived at University College Dublin, The Blue Nib Lit - Journal, The Write Life Magazine, Unity Global Festival, Vox Galvia at the Galway Advertiser, A New Ulster Literary Press, The Burrow Lit. Journal, Poet-Head.Wordpress.com, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Galway Review and The Irish Canadian Cultural Newsmagazine, New Brunswick.

She writes with Over the Edge, Thursday writing/reading group at Galway Arts Centre, and, Ox Mountain Poets, Sligo. She is listed in the Index of Contemporary Women Poets in Ireland, 2020. She holds several Educational qualifications, Including a Degree in Arts in Humanities, from Sligo IT.

Her background is in Advocacy in Human and Social Rights. Margaret has completed numerous courses and workshops in writing, for prose and poetry.

Margaret has four grown-up children. She lives in Westmeath with her dog Molly. She is a landscape painter. Is into Nature, walking, gardening, music, and heritage. She is working towards a First collection in Poetry.

Social Media-

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/margaretgibbonskiernan/@kiernanmargaret

Facebook: http://facebook.com/margaret.kiernan

 

Two Prose Pieces by Greg Patrick

The Morrigan

Goddess of War and Fate

By Greg Patrick

“Then the creatures of the high air answered to the battle, foretelling the destruction that would be done that day; and the sea chattered of the losses, and the waves gave heavy shouts keening them, and the water-beasts roared to one another, and the rough hills creaked with the danger of the battle, and the woods trembled mourning the heroes, and the grey stones cried out at their deeds, and the wind sobbed telling them, and the earth shook, foretelling the slaughter; and the cries of the grey armies put a cloak over the sun, and the clouds were dark; and the hounds and the whelps and the crows, and the witches of the valley, and the powers of the air, and the wolves of the forests, howled from every quarter and on every side of the armies, urging them against one another.”

― Augusta Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men: The Story of the Tuatha De Danaan and the Fianna of Ireland



Standing unyielding before the cold shimmer of brandished swords and spears the young

warrior does the forbidden and whispers her name.

"Morrigan"...

He feels a raven's shadow like a dark caress. Tantalised by her dark spell

he feels the lycanthropic rapture of battle, emboldens him to scorn their blades.

And he slays many, believes himself to be immortal as song, till the first spear slips

past his guard then a sword. He envisions her, rallies past the pain on the apparition in red and black.

The throaty bray of war horns sweeps his soul even as her name caresses it like a bardsong.

Morrigan, muse to bards, infecting them in throes of feverish inspiration and eloquence, fickle

mistress to warrior kings. Dreamt in fleeting seductive vision, in the flourish of raven wings, hailing

victor and vanquished in feathers like dark tears. Syrenic eyes shimmer a momento mori, red lips

as crimson as a she-wolf over her kill, opening to utter a name like a reopened wound.

She is beheld by the dimming light of the mortally wounded warrior's eyes as night befalls the

land after the last war horn and battle cry trails off, their banner has fallen, and the wounded beg for

death in their last agony. Where is She? She is seen in the dark trailing shadow of warrior's marching

shadows, the veil by which warriors cry in the dark, heard in the echo of laughter in the intoxicated

mead-driven boasts of warriors on eve of battle.

"Where art thou then Dark Goddess? Did the Druids speak false of thee?"

Scavenging ravens rise like a dark prayer and he sees her then as he shudders with pain and

cold. She seems to glide rather than stride through the mist. Seeking him alone over the corpses of men

and carcasses of horses. He fumbles for his sword with pale trembling hand to ward her off...She laughs,

a sickly-sweet mockery like venomed honey, like shattered stained glass.

She pulls back her hood, a pale impossibly radiantly beautiful face framed by waves of raven

hair, deep as darkness of fathomless sea against the pallor of her cheeks.

"Do you know what it is to be loved by the Goddess of war mortal?" she challenges, her

voice as melodious as bardsong. He closes his eyes in expectant ecstasy, arms spread in willing sacrifice.

Then opens on impulse and sees her true form like an illusionist's art stripped bare.

Her face is crone-like leprous decaying, the true face of war behind its storied facade.

The wind echoes then with a thousand haunted laments, stirring the manes of fallen horses and

banners, as she reaches for him with skeletal taloned fingers to claim him. She leers with rotted teeth,

kneels to inhale his soul. His last breath steams in the chill air. The fleeting, tantalising vision

of glory stripped bare of its sonorous illusion and he is now only a dying man among hundreds

of others unsung on a cold field, like the thirst-maddened nomad at last seeing the desolation

through the seductive mirage.

"Morrigan" he utters.

She rises rejuvenated, majestically beautiful and regal once more. Like a disappointed lover she

looks to the stars and to his cold slashed body. She leaves him dismissively as a drunken feaster breaks

a drained bottle against a wall. She leaves him in a sweep of dark gossamer gown like the flourish of

rising ravens having scavenged the red battlefield and seeking now others to feast on in an endless

banquet.





Across the Divide

By Greg Patrick

Written in Belfast



By the dwindling twilight his shadow was cast along the much graffitied wall dividing the two communities…As if his presence was more than eloquence alone…
He cast an inordinately generous amount in a soloist busker’s case and brushed past the curious look…
The old sentimental song ushering him into the night.
And the rebel angel’s soul of him danced with the lost souls in the song that seemed to ventriloquize the shadows.
He remembered when he embraced her…when he didn’t feel the chill rain
like the one that hailed him now.
“A lord of snow and rain”.
Disembodied music seemed to haunt the night as if a song’s title eluded a bewitched listener…
The face that so captivated him mid-step…the one that would move a busker to stop mid-song…allowing the last echoes of the song to fade like a lover’s ghost into the immolation of dawn…
A flash of startlingly impossibly green eyes before disappearing into the urban stream like a toast spilt in intoxication before it meets the lips…
Her gaze like a translation of light to music the way a soloist composer reads silence set to music….Captivated by the gaze like all wild things that freeze before onrushing car beams…Eyes like biolumined tide pools of Celtic sea in matchless Gemini. Gaze of soundless incantation.
The passing smile touched him like a tangible Aeolian caress not as the bard conjures song from harpstrings but as the bard’s song touches and captivates the soul and séances visions of broken dreams in distant eyes like a ghost haunting a castle’s ruins…
Beauty is a warning from nature and it went unheeded.
The night wind like the ghost of an imminent kiss’s breath before a duet of lips now steaming in a sigh like the soloist busker in duet to echoes alone like a song one could not get out of one’s head, like a somnambulance over the dreamscapes of the heart.
Not every man can be an island. One with rebellion at its heart and music at its soul.
In the background he heard the maddening throb of marching band’s drums like the parody of a heartbeat…The zombified tread of adhering feet.
Saw the alleyway illuminated in hellish splendour.
Like a moth in an aerial dance with a fatal light he waltzed with her against
a skyline of bonfires Vesuvianly blazing…A moth’s yearning for the burning. and the sensation of flight…
Like a found castaway overlooking a sea of fire…
Like a poem written against the flames she seemed.
The illusionist’s betrayal of hating by dystopian creed vanished by the counterspell of eyes that cast their Endorian maleficence…
And where the illusionist’s art was thwarted he knew magic in its true form…
Like the unmasking at the stroke of midnight at the masquerade ball…
“Take my hand this eve of the fires and together let’s throw back the dark…
And no wall will come between us again…”
Hailed anointingly in the embrace by the shockingly cold rain.
The storm swept over him enrapturingly…uttering her name in a thousand names…
Lips met in heretical duet…
A trinity of three words…
Like the belief that sacred texts would arise above the flames of a pyre…
And it seemed the stars obscured in the city night were reignited.
When will I see you again…?
He hearkened to the bell tolling the appointed hour…
His breath steamed in the chill air like the last shot of a duelist’s pistol…
He raised his collar and pulled his hat low as he strode across the high street the bells tolling in synchrony with his heart.
His muse made her entrance…His eyes rapt as if a lost nomad’s eyes
enthralled by the vision…as if all but saying “why doth the sun rise in the west”.
Illuminated he stood as if hailed in ash and flame. His arms spread awaiting an embrace that never came.
Her back exploding in red as she fell, her outline spreading
crimson from her splayed arms running towards his unfulfilled embrace like a red angel graffitied on the urban warzone.
He knelt over her…in a heartfelt last kiss trying to breathe life back into her.
Eyes looked up from hers…seeing nothing…
Transcending the ranks of advancing soldiers through the smoking ruins.
Deafened by the explosions yet understanding…
“Paddy ye have to let me go…”
The refined private-tutored voice…
“Go Paddy. They’ll kill you…”
“Come back to the light Elizabeth…”
He felt arms grab him…raising him.
The rubber bullets ricocheting off the walls.
Eyes fluttering open before their soulfire dwindled like the last light of the midnight sun to two standing looking.
Like the ruined bastion and sentinel reached by a causeway spanning the Celtic sea…”And no walls will come between us again…”
He had to wait…to wait until the mourners left. Till her people left and he could be alone with his lady. The crimson leaves of Samhain fell, hailing him.
A defiant look to the parson who told him to leave.
Tears like brandished warpaint.
A throbbing phantom pain in the presence of couples laughing and holding each other.
He remained aloof and alone in the pub, eyes brooding over
the rim of the untouched pint cup…raised a toast to an empty chair as if to a kingdom with an empty throne at its heart.
And unsung vision at a blinded bard’s soul…
Silhouetted against the hearth in dark profile.
You fell in love and rose over it…Over the bonfires...over the flags…over the murals…over a skyline of a city and night set on fire…




Part 2

Setting:
Dunluce Castle


He lingered as the last light of the sun ignited the sea before him like an illuminated manuscript.
He lingered at the causeway of Dunluce Castle till the first belated stars appeared. Like one passerby amid the throng who stops midstride at a solitary busker’s song and stands in a still slowdance with the memories haunting the song…Like a bard’s ghost waiting in solitary vigil to serenade a muse beyond his station…
He sang “She Moved Through The Fair” like a confidence betrayed to the night…
Like an eerie burning murmuration the aurora borealis danced over the castle’s legend-haunted towers…in a danse macabre of fluorescent light in spectral revel…The Northern lights illuminated her façade as if a mirage beckoned with gathering substance of form and face…
Envisioned like an artist wavering between finishing touches to complete a Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece…
Feeling more kindred to the chieftain’s bards and ladies who laughed and cried in the old song’s echoes…
He closed his eyes as if into a slowdance’s embrace….
The waves of the Celtic sea rolled over the dark shipwrecked fathoms
ventriloquizing the depth of his sigh…
Like a far-flung pilgrim awaiting an elusive vision…
The moon cast its spell of radiance over the shadow-haunted ruins…
Like her heart and soul.
As he stood like a sentinel of shadow… feeling older than the hills…
And the Celtic sea seemed to sigh…An expectant hush befell…
What he confided in brooding silence was a confidence between mortal and god alone…
The surface of sea mirrored the moon like a spectral portal
reopened.
The eternal song of the waves beckoned him to the crushing brink of sea…
awaiting a sacrificial offering.
He envisioned her in Orphean valediction.
Swaying in possessed waltz…He fell…As hard as a heart in love…a hard as he fell on the burning street. The shockwave swept over him.
He shuddered convulsively… A trembling hand reached for hers…Like
a soloist composer searching for the right words.
The shattering impact of water…The elusive luxuriant peace of the dark fathoms as if reclaiming an outcast changeling to the dark realms of song and legend.
Moonbeams followed him as he sank. Like a presence of radiance escorting him to the depths like an apparitional searchlight.

A dual citizen of Ireland and the states, Greg Patrick is an Irish/Armenian traveller poet and the son of a Navy enlisted man. He is also a former Humanitarian aid worker who worked with great horses for years and loves the wilds of Connemara and Galway in the rain where he's written many stories. Greg spent his youth in the South Pacific and Europe and currently resides in Galway, Ireland and sometimes the states.

Knight of the Rose - Prose Poem/Short Story by Greg Patrick

 

Knight of the Rose 

By Greg Patrick

 

“Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea”-Dylan Thomas

 

            A lone horseman reined-in at the threshold of forest’s dark sanctuary. A chill wind sang

through the canopies of oaks as he raised his forearm. A gyrfalcon pale-feathered as 

moonbeams rose gracefully to the beacon of a lit window in yonder castle afar. Bound to its

talons was a message for eyes of the green of fathomless Celtic sea. The falcon was emblazoned

against the rising full moon on whose tides he sailed for this shore.

            The raptor’s feathers falling like ghost tears for the slain chieftains on whom the grass

had grown. Its shrill cry like a land bereaved of heirs sang, seeming to herald his homecoming to

a green Ithaka. Moonbeams tinged green as they filtered through the swaying banners of leaves

lit his face like a highwayman’s mask as he sighed a name like the title of the song, his breath

steaming in the cold.

            He had fallen asleep sheltered amid ancient standing stones, his sleep haunted by strange

dreams. It had been many ages since the hills and enemies had trembled under the great

charioteer warriors. The legends banished from the songs of the clans, but they existed in dream

and in songs in the depths of forest like forbidden love songs to one beyond their station.

Wreaths of mist crowned the kings in ghostly coronation as he whispered bardic songs in his

sleep.

            He awoke to the rising light as he rode through the monoliths of ancient clans long

passed, architects of dreams and mystery in a storied land. He had paused, eyes closed like the

last faithful scribe at the deathbed of a Highking. The last loyal retainer in a dark empty

throne room recording his echoing words.

 

            In the misty dawn a herd of red deer scattered as a horse and rider broke cover from the

sentinel-like trees. Sensing they were not his quarry they paused and looked on curiously as he

rode towards the distant castle. Landscape seemed dreamscape like the radiance of dawn

fluttering at a dreamer’s opening eyes. Fields adorned with flowers like a gown of a princess

who awaited to be reunited with a returned prince in homecoming.

            It was as if roses piled in memory of one lost at the sea were cast up instead hailing the

seafarer’s unexpected return. The hooves fell in synchrony with his heart and the wind roared in

his ears. Like a cold shadow cast suddenly by gathering clouds he remembered when last he rode

these fields they were red-ashed in aftermath of battle and the besieged castle was like an

Atlantean bastion all but falling under stormswept waves of flame.

            He had marched at the vanguard of a rebel band to the shrill of bagpipes in renegade

intervention when his chieftain had taken oath of fealty to a lord across the sea. He would not

disavow his love’s clan when the enemy marched on their walls.

            In exile he had looked back across the wake with Orphean valediction to the diminishing

shore before setting his eyes grimly to the Shaharazadian allure of the dark horizon on a voyage

to Eastern lands and crusade, vowing to return. The last sight of his homeland was the distant

trees of the fall like red banners.

            “When the leaves are green again, I shall return for thee…”

            The ocean-bound wind swept from the trees to his hair and closed his eyes, his lips

moving in soundless prayer. Now the horse of an exotic breed from lands of oasisless mirages

and dunes, tossed red petals from its mane like sparks and blood particles as his warhorse had

done when he last strode these realms.

            And his laughter was a soloist song privy to his own daydreams that beckoned him forth.

He halted the stallion, its flanks heaving. He caressed the harp he bore at his side, feeling the

Aeolian-stirred song of her laughter in memory. So distant the memory as to seem the time of

legends, as distant as the voids between the stars by which the nomad and mariner found their

path.

            Flurries of crimson petals like a druidic bonfire’s immolation swirled around him. Lips

spoke her name like a wound reopening when it had pulsed in the cold. The words that came to

him were like disembodied voices of the spirits of glen and stream. The blood chant of his heart

throbbed to the beat of words unsung, but all great words begin forbidden. They echo in

catacombal secrecy before they are sung gentiley before court and empress.

            He wore the garb of a humble itinerant minstrel, but the ravens had seen the chainmail

and scabbard before he donned it and cowled his face. They knew death rode with him and they

hovered over him like a dark retinue. He fell in with a band of entertainers seeking a lordly

patron as they thronged the road and hastened against the threat of rain to the castle holding court

for a betrothal. He passed into the cold shadow of the Norman keep’s gate, squaring his

shoulders as it closed behind.

            Gaelic was forbidden in the castle court now. Troubadours and minstrels sang by lute in

the stead of the Hibernian bards, but when his “name” was called he strode to the harp of the hall

like returned Odysseus to the bow only his hand could truly string as the suitors looked on

haughtily.

            He strummed at first non-committedly then as their eyes met as she sat engarlanded like a

floral enhaloment and gowned in white ermine and gossamer. A bard’s vision of beauty behind

startingly green eyes and natural crown of red. The merriment of the table that had drowned out

the other minstrels. The jests and mirth fell silent as if by incantation as the harpsong

cast its apparitional spell with the moonbeams.

            His very words that incantation under the enchantment of the muse. He told their story in

the props and trappings of the Norman lord’s own land, to the castles of the

Loire valley. In turn the song was cathartic as a letter written on eve of battle and at others the

song was aloof as a soloist or pilgrim lighting a shrine candle for his own dream.

            It was like Orion’s song in the eternal wilds of the stars haunting the earthbound.

He played as maleficiently as he had amid the pavilion fires of the crusader armies

so far from tuliped fields of Christendom before they were to cross sword with scimitar.

            It was written that “moonlight was sculpture” but harpsong is like the art of a tapestry-

maker. A storyboard of scenes of battle and chase seemed to be woven before spellbound eyes in

phantasmal procession. The fire that silhouetted him like a rebel angel playing in the flames

sighed like charmed serpents as flames were granted form and face to enact scenes before

they faded back into the embers.

             It was said that “all memories happen to music”. His eyes sang their duet to hers

face mirrored in voluminous depth of green. As if the smile alone like notes read by a

Stradivarius-player transported them with the raw wild beauty of the song to the shore of a loch

with the twilight-reddened waves lapping at her feet as she stood like a poem written against the

sunset.

            As he doffed his helm and a sash of green bound his arm before battle on the morrow.

Under cover of darkness, vines flowing like a green tapestry from the castle walls were scaled

hand over hand.

            A waiting horse’s tether held by a kern was passed to a gauntleted wolf-pelt sleeved

hand. In answer to a serenade, she appeared at the window like a PreRaphealite masterpiece

subject framed. The very essence of a Celtic bard’s inspiration. Her hand held to his forehead a

gesture approaching veneration, she was raised to the saddle by a knight clad in black night-

attack armour. A sentry cried out and a Gaelic battle cry answered in defiance.

            Fire arrows meant to illuminate the grounds like flares, streaked around. The horse reared

terrified but he held his saddle. When the hooves fell again, he drew an exotic weapon from

Eastern lands, a horse archer’s bow and answered the attack. Men fell from the battlements as the

iron-shod hooves smote the cobbles in flight. A cauldrenous mist seemed to gather as if the

ghosts haunting ruins and standing stones thronged the warrior poet to hear his songs. Mist

seemed to shroud the protectively as if they passed into legend.

 

A dual citizen of Ireland and the states, Greg Patrick is an Irish/Armenian traveller poet and the son of a Navy enlisted man.  He is also a former Humanitarian aid worker who worked with great horses for years and loves the wilds of Connemara and Galway in the rain where he's written many stories. Greg spent his youth in the South Pacific and Europe and currently resides in Galway, Ireland and sometimes the states.

 

One Excellent Prose Piece by Greg Patrick

 

Last Light of Midsummer's Eve

 

“If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended,

That you have but slumbered here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream"-William Shakespeare

 

            Like ghosts created by broken hearts or warriors left unsung and nameless by the scribe's pen, our presence haunts the dreamscape of moor by shroud of mist and twilight...like an elusive muse to a bard composing in isolation...like a knight's soul fallen short of the angelic and bound then to the land of mortals. Dimunitised, caricatured, like the phoenix become the firefly or the great dragons of sagas become cold-blooded monsters to slay. That is the best way for them to remember us, the only way for the yearning to heal…To believe of us "they were not so great”.

            Shorn of our bright armour and crowning silver of hair, reduced to mere weaving bright lights of Midsummer's eve that leaves the shepherd watching in wonder at the vision, feeling somehow a prince and the noble huntsman pursuing the mirage of a white stag feeling profoundly poor by the spell of those lights. Our majesty, they thought was humbled.

            A lost society we were, a tribe in exile...but the moon draws us forth like moths rising to the immolation of light, inexorably, the song of a bard in solitude. The chords played in the greenwood beckons to us. In its haunting echoes we remember our grand palatial halls presided by king enthroned with high queen and court. We remained a people apart, relegated to the shadows eyed uneasily by the mortals though we were called upon to aid in the land's darkest hour…No cup nor smile nor kiss shared among their people in the revels after the battle.

When we answered the call of a haggard prince who fell to his knees at the ancient rings of stones and cried out...

"Help us! Guardians of the land".

Something in his features betrayed a shared blood, when a prince of our kind stepped from the sanctuary of stones to a song in the greenwood by one crowned as if in twilight and garland and to a forbidden embrace. And we answered his cry for we were bound to as a knight of their kind is bound to answer his lord's warhorn afar.

            Upon the red moor when battle seemed lost when the land was to be usurped by men who bore the raven banner over the sea. Had their eyes been raised beyond the flowing dark banners hailed by their brandished gored sword, they have would have seen the flocks of circling ravens that followed their march like a dark wake then disperse in a great dark wave formation breaking to disarray in mid-air and pacing wolves in the dark pillars of ancient forest cease and their eyes betraying bewilderment, then recoiling as they fade back into the shadowed depths of woodland as if they with their keen senses felt the presence of a greater hunter approaching. They would feed later on the warriors of the north like ranks of dark knights making way for a great warlord. But the great pale alpha she-wolf turns and sounds a cry to the air darkened by burning trees and homesteads as if sounding a warhorn in heralding the coming of a lord of battles.

            The aerial cries of the falcons soaring the fortress-crowned heights of those realms seemed to merge in choir like emissaries announcing the warhost of a fighting prince in a shrill cry that changed to the silvery strain of a clarion. The voice of the bard playing the harp to rally the last stand of defenders as swords cross turned dreamy, prophetic, his eyes growing distant and transfixed.

            “They’ve been called forth.”

            His hands pass like a shudder along the harpstrings and it seemed the fabric of earth and sky shuddered with it as if a warrior tossed under a blanket in throes of nightmare-haunted sleep before awakening with sword drawn and threw off the covers and nightmare banished.

            "They're here."

            We appeared not in ranks of horse or of footsoldiers to their eyes but it seemed the northern lights of their lands. We appeared with the famished hunger of the winter that seemed given voice in a battle cry of hunters over their kill, the eternal battle of light and dark waged. And by the last light of the gloaming, the midnight sun, we appeared to the eyes of the living as if lights in the sky, mariner's sigh were granted form and face. We were a terrible sight to behold. Knights clad in pale armour as if forged from celestial gold in the smithies of ancient gods.

            Before the sun was to set on a field of the dead and bonfires lit by victorious armies of axe and torch, the last light of the twilight embraziered the hair of a warrior woman who fought in the custom of the clans as one with the High King's warriors. She raised a gauntleted hand to ward off a rune-engraved sword poised to fall. It was caught in mid-stroke and the thane looked into laughing irisless eyes.The blade glowed as hotly as the eve it was forged and melted to the hilt. A dagger flashes and he expects me to fall. No blood spills. He draws back.

            "Loki?"

The name of one of his gods.

I laugh and it is a terrible sound to his ears, maddening...He falls to his knees clasping his ears against it. I lift him by his neck and he dangles like quarry in a falcon's talons...the faces of all who fell to his blade appear before him, pale hands beckoning him to darkness. Spears of his warriors glance sparkingly off my armour as I cast him like a mortal rider thrown by an Elvish horse.

            The battle has strayed into the standing stones. They have trespassed. They have profaned our realm with blood and iron. Hands rise from the ground as if the very land they sought to desecrate rose against them and grasp the warriors of the north and pull them down as if consumed by the earth. "Rise daughter of the Celts" I bade her. Yet she recoils from the faerkind's touch. I understand. And in the silence that falls...The moorwind alone gives voice to a breathless sigh of an immortal, stirring the dark manes of horses the hair of lifeless men and fallen banners.

            That evening when the prince held court. Even the hearthfire seemed to recoil at the presence of us.. the pallor of our faces, refined striking angular features distinguished us as the faerkind. And yet when their court bard of our mortal allies in battle rose from the harp to the applause of their people, I approach the instrument. They make way...out of deference or recoiling from fear I know not.

            My eyes that bear kindred quality to the far-seer falcon and those blessed or cursed as oracles close as I lean to the instrument like a wounded knight trusting his horse to bear him back from the aftermath of battle, so too did the music seem to take course and life of its own...all living things that stirred in the greenwood, bird and beast seemed to give voice to its life and cry, the hunters and the hidden, the wind that was sonorous in the warrior's ears as the last sight of the castle and those watching their passing from the towers, left in the march to battle vanished from sight beyond the green banners of trees and only carnage romanticised as glory awaited the bardsong.

            Scenes of chase in the greenwood… of huntsman after phantom stags and scenes of battle immortalized in tapestries are illuminated by firelight cast by the hearth and paid homage by the echoes of the harpsong played by a conjuring hand. My finger's hovered before the strings like moonbeams coursing over the surface of a loch. I touch not the strings in caress but their hearts tangibly, drawing banished ghosts of memory...of heartbreak...loss. Like a warrior crying in the dark heard through castle walls…all that reminds them they are human.

            Memory and present like a people apart…yearning as the nomad craves the oasis for the mirage to bear substance. Like the writhing throes of a moth ensnared in a spider web then feeling the wind tear the web asunder so too does the music draw at the restraints of the thought of their time. The harpsong calls upon the restless wonder of the youth to understand our kind by song...to know the immortal way.

            All were spellbound but the shadows cast by those present strayed from their hosts and danced and mingled with our own as if escaping from the restraint of their elders for a forbidden last dance of the night. Dancing like disembodied lights weaving on Midsummer's eve by the standing stones before returning to their wearers. Ghosts of those that had fallen in battle seemed to revisit those that wore the dark of the bereaved and seemed to whisper farewell in sad valediction as the song ceased and others began anew.

“What are you..?”

            The words hovered in the air…

            As if replying to a song request, the music became darker-toned, as

he played with a conjuring hand, as if with a stage illusionist’s flourish a flight of ravens

appeared...their feathers altering colour in mid-air and as the fire in the hearth swayed and

whispered like charmed serpents...

            It was written that “moonlight was sculpture” but harpsong is like the art of a tapestry-maker. A storyboard of battle and chase seemed to be woven before spellbound eyes in phantasmal procession.  Scenes and shapes seemed to be granted form as if haunting memory was seanced...the way one would look intently into a fire in bereavement or brooding and behold images of dreams and nightmares morph from flames only to disperse like a vexing mirage of red appearing before a lost pilgrim’s gaze one that could not be extinguished by all the oases before them, visions like sandcastles built by young dreamers only to be swept away by sunset waves or a nomad’s footsteps on red dunes swept away by the ageless wind. Some exorcised ghosts others conjured them. I was a conjurer among ghosts and haunted ruins that were once castles.

            Like molten gold and silver, the strains seemed, so rich and flowing the chords played...a nocturne of rare bewitchment, like the first belated stars casting their pale spell over the vales. The music ceased. I rose from the harp. They avoid my eyes. I understand. They are not ready to abstain from unjust fear that divides men to banners and opposing ranks of warriors...the kind that turn the innocent midwife to a witch before chanting crowds.

            They are not ready. We take our leave of them as the bells toll the hour and we cringe at the sound, not because we are an unhallowed kind but because we know it is not our time and place any longer. Moved to do so the prince runs to the threshold like a boy roused from nightmares when his father is absent at war and looks through the windowpane as snow falls as softly as we disappear into the night…so our forms diminish like a song or embrace of dreams back to the stone ring. He lingers yearning to follow for apart of him remains between worlds yet.

            As green leaves become red, as black hair becomes grey, as first cry becomes last words and breath it will his time to rejoin us...for now he feels the soft touch of his betrothed and is drawn back from the call of our kind. And as we pass through sentinels of ancient oaks as if back through portals and mists of legend…It is our hour.

            By the last light of the Midsummer's moon's vexing spell we call to the ghosts by name...the ghosts of those who fell to the swords of tyrants, by their own hands from betrayal, by the torch of the witch-hunter and the knife of sacrifice for men did not understand that gods had no need for blood- shed and by that light and the echoes of the song of the Elvish harp we danced with those shadows till the red dawn and only a soldier returned from wars in the desert and the youth who knew first love saw us for what we are by gazing at the lights.

A dual citizen of Ireland and the states, Greg Patrick is an Irish/Armenian traveller poet and the son of a Navy enlisted man.  He is also a former Humanitarian aid worker who worked 

with great horses for years and loves the wilds of Connemara and Galway in the rain where he's written many stories. Greg spent his youth in the South Pacific and 

 

Europe and currently resides in Galway, Ireland and sometimes the states.