I won’t be begging you, but I wish you’d join me on my first graveyard walk of the season. We’ll leave at dusk on the last dark moon of summer, and the rising silver moonlight will lick the soft pink of the gloaming in just the right places. We’ll strip ourselves bare. We’ll be creatures of the hallowed evening and witches of the swelling spirit-lands. Every ancient incantation scratched on our bones will be visible through our skin, and our eyes will glow with a fire-lit brilliance that sparks and dims in rhythm with our heartbeats, that pulses in time with the old rhymes our hooded grannies beat on their drums, that illuminates the way forward even as we gather a sea of ghosts behind us.
Will you come, my truest friend?
You’ll tell me of your wickedest moment, and I’ll share my darker secrets in return. We’ll leave all our summer sweetness behind and step into the shadows cast by gnarled oaks and low-bowing willows, sopped in a rich indigo grief that tastes of slow-simmered nettles and bitter-spiced wine. The poetry of the dead will roll from our tongues in rough lilts, sharp sputters, and a long-humming otherworldly resonance. Our songs will be a tapestry woven from earth’s eulogy and the human-animal’s swan song. We’ll move like memories move, in sudden sounds and potent colors sourced without sense from a time long-passed.
Our flesh will fall from our bones just as that Harvest Moon dawns and midnight swaddles our skulls in a crown of grey-milk heathen remembrance, and we’ll tread so lightly on the ground where our beloved dead are buried. Together, we’ll curl our creaking skeletons into heaps of hissing and howling memorial, into stacks of rattling ivory spirals stamped with fading sigils of belonging.
Relics of ancestral joy, we shall be. Wild and undead reminders to those who lie below that not all their stories are lost, we two. Between the leaning stones, we’ll lie, whispering the somber words of the worn epitaphs into the dirt through our teeth.
So, join me?
In time, yellowed and mud-caked hands will pierce the moss around us, and the ones whose names no one remembers will dig their way to the surface to rest by our sides. We, their descendants, and they, our mighty dead. Just as the first drying leaves begin to fall from their branches, the holy and untended ground will wail for us all, for the wonder and awe we have not yet lived, for the anxious days spent depriving ourselves of tongue-on-tongue indulgence, and we’ll dream of colder nights having their way with us over and over again.
Together, we’ll wake whole, wrapped in our soft shroud of skin with our long-gone loved ones nested in the fertile, wormy deep. Heavy in body and hot with conviction, we’ll be. Our heart-drums will have never echoed so loudly in our ears. The raw beauty of morning will have never brought such a sacred ache to our humanness.
We’ll whisper a final sunrise prayer to those who lie below, a bespoken vow to let this life of ours live us, to be dreamt into our greatest autumn incarnation by those who could only pray for the radical wildness we wake with now, and we’ll rejoin the realm of the most cunning creatures before that looming equinox swallows us all whole in shadows of oblivion and grace.
So, my most bewitching love, will you join me?
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I won’t be begging you, but I wish you’d join me on my first graveyard walk of the season. We’ll leave at dusk on the last dark moon of summer, and the rising silver moonlight will lick the soft pink of the gloaming in just the right places. We’ll strip ourselves bare. We’ll be creatures […] -
I won’t be begging you, but I wish you’d join me on my first graveyard walk of the season. We’ll leave at dusk on the last dark moon of summer, and the rising silver moonlight will lick the soft pink of the gloaming in just the right places. We’ll strip ourselves bare. We’ll be creatures […] -
I won’t be begging you, but I wish you’d join me on my first graveyard walk of the season. We’ll leave at dusk on the last dark moon of summer, and the rising silver moonlight will lick the soft pink of the gloaming in just the right places. We’ll strip ourselves bare. We’ll be creatures […]
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I won’t be begging you, but I wish you’d join me on my first graveyard walk of the season. We’ll leave at dusk on the last dark moon of summer, and the rising silver moonlight will lick the soft pink of the gloaming in just the right places. We’ll strip ourselves bare. We’ll be creatures […] -
I won’t be begging you, but I wish you’d join me on my first graveyard walk of the season. We’ll leave at dusk on the last dark moon of summer, and the rising silver moonlight will lick the soft pink of the gloaming in just the right places. We’ll strip ourselves bare. We’ll be creatures […]
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