Chaos in Green Valley
1
It was his Ravens first brought
the news
Uncalled for, unwelcome on that
morning,
Cawing as a bad surprise ,
unsuspected
And making stomache drop and hard
At what, through the noise
emerged.
No support to hand, Wolf’s away
Feeding Arctic Appetites but must
come soon,
She thought as cold dawning and
the ice
Of determination froze.
“He found the door, he found the
door”
Cawed Thought and Memory.
“By the Black isle, beyond
Stornoway,
he walked through, upright,
and was gone”
She sat down on the earth,
now most likely hers to guard,
and felt that sunlight did not
warm her now.
These two Ravens are not enough,
They hold his history in the
beaky heads,
But history does not give us
intuition,
Does not help us when the barley
rots,
Does not settle land disputes
Or order winter to be over,
So we must reinvent anew.
I will not leave the land
I will hold all for when he may
return,
Against my wedding to the earth,
And I will that all will live.
She did the things then
that one has to do,
And told the bees their master’s
gone,
Keeping the thought inside her
head
That this may not indeed be true,
But what do bees know, she grimly
thought,
Of dreaming worlds and Fisher
Kings.
The hives all took the news quite
well
And their buzzing grew in
valediction
Till the garden hummed and
throbbed,
Sound waves heat-hazing garden
walls,
And her vision rippled,
And Queen to queen the hives then
spoke
To her as if to say
We are queens, we know the score,
We have resolved to stay.
There are the animals, butter ,
My new garden, its herbs and flowers,
A realm’s maintenance,
And then some more:
My healing, world dreaming.
Will the other-worlders know
where he has gone ?
The thought cascaded and she
stood,
A new adventure called her,
Where her bags, her cloak, filled
purse and wand ?
Bees stopped their chorus and a
world spun slowly.
The Ravens spoke in chorus
“the land comes first, your
country is your life”
and sitting down again,
homespun skirt on flagstones,
chives and thyme bravely growing
through the gaps
she saw that this was true.
But the smell kicked her brain
And lavender gave her thought
And memory went far back before
she was ever born,
Offering nuggets and arcane
hints.
And so she smiled
A narrow smile that says
That she had found the first step
onwards.
Hands dug, furiously into clay and
soil,
And moulding, modelling,
breathing,
Hands created a third raven,
As she breathed and blew
Feathers from dusty loam grew,
And she whispered it its names,
“you are dreamer, heart catcher,
far traveller, confidante,
you are the third and sister to the
two,
your name is Intuition.”
And the white Raven fluttered up
Perched with Thought and Memory,
Who began to groom their sister
As if nothing untoward occurred
Now I can begin to mourn,
She sighed,
And picked up the hoe
And finished the weeding.
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