A somber sun was setting on the season of death, and I raised my hood against the last winter wind while the ghosts of pagan-midwives drummed us all into the dark. I hummed. I wept. I followed these wise ones into the birthing cave, stepping in time with the rhythm of this ancient dirge my soul remembered but my modern mind forgot. I heard them, these unseen others, when they sang their spectral eulogy into the inky gloaming while the sun splintered into one hundred million verses. I listened while they drummed the snows to death and the seeds to life, but I feared for my lost innocence.
The season of death was done, but no echoes of soft-petaled birth poetry echoed inside my bitter witch’s heart. My tongue was dry. The fires of my rage lay cool and smoking in my gut. I was a walking death shroud, poorly stitched and wrapped ‘round the corpses of cut trees and severed roots. No bright-eyed dream-weaver had come to light the candle of hope while I slept. No laughing ancestor had whispered what I needed in this, the time of the unnamable ache. Spring had come, or so these bone-women sang, but I saw no signs of butterfly wings.
The dark mouth of the first spring night swallowed me whole, and I closed my eyes so I could better see the shape of their skulls. These bone-hags, these gods before there were gods, they circled around my broken-by-winter body and drummed hard on the skins of dead kings who once fed on children’s tears. I wailed with them while they sang of the sickness of dying rulers who wear crowns forged in young men’s blood and plated with ill-gotten gold, who sit in empty playrooms and plot wargames, who forget the wisdom of their own seer-grandmothers who would put them to bed until they could better dream and better be.
My limbs twisted into unnatural shapes, and a primordial pulse overtook my womb. I clawed into the mud, and my insides churned like a saltwater eddy full of wild. I howled. I spit. My spine ached in time with the bone-women’s drums. I coughed into the dirt. I retched my righteous rage into the ground where the graves of the grandfathers could hold it. I shapeshifted into a lone wolf-mother on all fours, and I made those sounds a beast makes only when death and life enter the birthing cave, arm-in-arm and looking to dance.
I kept going. The hags kept drumming. I surrendered to the swell. A cosmic egg cracking open, I was. A seed’s shell busted to dust from the inside out, I became. I let go of my more rigid forms, and I let this eruption derange my joints. I was a great falling apart. I was destruction housed inside failing flesh.
The bone-spirits mirrored my unholy body prayer, and the deer-women with their own swollen bellies came to sit in this song circle to mind my mood. For an eternal instant, I was a falling star hurdling toward earth, a hollow-faced angel with severed wings losing all memory of light. I tasted blood. I heard the hum this hallowed planet makes to call its souls home, and all went cold and still.
The drums went silent. The song had ended, and I opened my eyes to find myself alone on a cave floor scattered with antlers, bones, eggshells, and afterbirth. I marked my face with imaginal cells and the blood from my thighs. I walked from the cave into the dawn, letting the morning fog wash away the last of winter’s flaked skin and cradling my tender hope like a newborn.
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A somber sun was setting on the season of death, and I raised my hood against the last winter wind while the ghosts of pagan-midwives drummed us all into the dark. I hummed. I wept. I followed these wise ones into the birthing cave, stepping in time with the rhythm of this ancient dirge my […] -
A somber sun was setting on the season of death, and I raised my hood against the last winter wind while the ghosts of pagan-midwives drummed us all into the dark. I hummed. I wept. I followed these wise ones into the birthing cave, stepping in time with the rhythm of this ancient dirge my […] -
A somber sun was setting on the season of death, and I raised my hood against the last winter wind while the ghosts of pagan-midwives drummed us all into the dark. I hummed. I wept. I followed these wise ones into the birthing cave, stepping in time with the rhythm of this ancient dirge my […]
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A somber sun was setting on the season of death, and I raised my hood against the last winter wind while the ghosts of pagan-midwives drummed us all into the dark. I hummed. I wept. I followed these wise ones into the birthing cave, stepping in time with the rhythm of this ancient dirge my […] -
A somber sun was setting on the season of death, and I raised my hood against the last winter wind while the ghosts of pagan-midwives drummed us all into the dark. I hummed. I wept. I followed these wise ones into the birthing cave, stepping in time with the rhythm of this ancient dirge my […]
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