Tag: Devotional Poetry

III. Your Hunt

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Day Three of Twelve Days of Devotion to Gwyn ap Nudd

On this third day
I consider Your hunt,
Your hunt for the souls of the dead
and of the living – for shapeshifting magical creatures.

How You are a hunter of soul itself appearing
like an epiphany in the soullessness
above streets and towerblocks
in the modern world,

breaking through
our isolation and depression,

awakening souls to other souls
and to the urge to hunt within us all.

How You awakened the huntress in me
and took me to places I would never have explored.

How you placed my soul in my hands changing
like a Rubix cube into countless animals
and departing as a snake.

You are a hunter of souls
and one day all souls will be gathered
in You, all the magic, all the magical creatures.

I will live until this day through many lives devoted to You.

II. Your Boyhood

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Day Two of Twelve Days of Devotion to Gwyn ap Nudd

On this second day
I consider Your boyhood,
all the boys you have been.

The boy in the serpent skins
born to transform a land
of bones and gore
into beauty,

Your return
as a wolf cub
or a boy in wolf skins
to Your awenyddion letting us
sit You on our knees,
tell You stories.

How when
You were a babe
You never cried but howled.

There was a little of Your boy in me
when I was growing up –
I always hated dolls, played
with Thundercats and Ninja Turtles
and wrote about characters from
Streetfigher in the back
of my exercise books at school.

There are parts of me that refuse to grow up
and keep returning to the playground
where I swing over the top
of the swings

that are no longer there on Middleforth Green

knowing You will catch me
and take me to
the stars.

I. Your Birth

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Day One of Twelve Days of Devotion to Gwyn ap Nudd

On this first day
I consider Your birth,
how you were torn from the womb
and flung into the Abyss,
how You were born

falling

and wonder
if I was born falling too.
For it seems I have never stopped falling,
spiralling downward through life,
never up the career ladder,
deeper into the well,
into the Deep,
into You.

I think of how we have both
crawled from the Abyss
and reclaimed our kingdoms –
Yours built out of dragon bones
and mine from words.

I have built mine for You
and welcomed You in as You
have welcomed me into Yours
and each in the other’s we
have been reborn.

Twelve Days of Devotion to Gwyn ap Nudd

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For the last couple of years, as a Pagan/Polytheist alternative to the traditional ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ (26th December – 6th January) I have been practicing twelve days of devotion to Gwyn ap Nudd, my patron God, as a Brythonic Winter King.

This year, over the twelve days, I am going to be meditating on the following aspects of His identity and mythos and writing and sharing devotional poems addressed to Him.

I. Your Birth
II. Your Boyhood
III. Your Hunt
IV. Your Beloved
V. Your Battle
VI. Winter
VII. Your Horse
VIII. Your Hound
IX. Your Doors
X. Your Kingdom
XI. Your Cauldron
XII. Your Death

If you would like to join in with this or do something similar for Gwyn or your personal Gods please feel welcome and let me know how it goes.

You Are My Truth

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You are the God who awoke my soul from its coffin. 

You are the God who awoke my questing and my questioning of all truths. 

You are the God whose truths have a misty question mark hovering over them.

You are the God who showed me the truth of the mist, the fog, shrouding, obscuring, revealing only half-truths, shifting like metaphor, escaping words.

You are the God of the truths of the void, the abyss, the darkness and the beautiful illusions that cover them lest we run screaming, clawing out our eyes.

You are the God who visited me with the truth of madness.

You are the God whose light is truth only after years of wandering lost in the mist, following the long dark tunnels, running, shouting through the catacombs.

You are the God of truth’s veiling and its unveiling and of the veil between the worlds.

Your truth begins in namelessness and comes to shine brightest in Your name.

Vindos, Gwyn, Hunter in the Skies, Light of the Mist, Lord of the Abyss, by all Your names and none, until all worlds are gone and ever after, You are my truth.