From a night of long sleep
In the dark of the womb
Maponus Maponus
Awaken the dawn
With a beam of bright youth
From a wild shy horse
Maponus Maponus
Illumine the morn
In a smiling ascent
To a shining throne
Maponus Maponus
Rise high at noon
Emblazoning clouds
And falling through leaves
Maponus Maponus
Colour the eve
With a sinking yawn
To the arms of trust
Maponus Maponus
Descend at dusk
Fay bells chime. You ride a pale horse tonight.
My white mare pines for infinite horizons.
From this false security’s plastic peace
I breathe a prayer for ecstatic release.
Wrenched like tendons, reality is severed.
You open a snow storm, marvel and terror,
suburb stripped bare, hung trees and glittering ice,
a spectral host bathed in sweeping starlight.
Some people don’t see them. The rest run scared.
With my reckless steed I join the nightmare.
Our heart beats quicken to Annwn’s dread trance.
Street lamps flicker. Roofs slip into the distance.
Fairy lights and festive chants spread the county
from Blackpool Tower to Winter Hill, bright fountains
dissolve to torch parades. The present falters
revealing a past of village and bonfire,
chill chapped hands, hungry gatherings at cauldrons,
a labyrinth of padways mazed across Pilling
buried by snow fall, entombed beneath glaciers.
A cold unbearable sets in to kill.
And I fear I’m trapped in the Age of Ice
on the day of doom at the end of time
I cannot move my frozen mind. I scream
“Why? Winter King, bear me to these extremes?”
Your look commands; survey this fragile land,
ice crafting the mythos you toil to grasp,
reshaping the hills, renaming the towns,
creating the isle you know as Britain.
Wild laughter rings from the hollow landscape.
The fate of worlds tilts on a teetering brink.
I see your task, unruly guardian
of streaming vast ancestral tradition.
History rushes back and my course is clear,
My return to Penwortham swiftly steered,
shaking off snow, flexing my cold fingers,
I whisper thanks for your winter visions.
On the silted shore of the Ribble
Where the gulls dip and call
The river banks her vista
And the tides ebb and flow
In unending expeditions
From the land to the sea
The brooks broach their quantas
And descry their misery.
Fish House Brook:
How long now?
Penwortham Brook:
Patience little sister, can’t you see the times are changing?
Fish House Brook:
I’m barely in a position to perceive change
Caught in the constrictions of the concrete culverts
Cut by the man-made channels, blinkered in blind
Alley-ways, forced through dire traps and grilles,
Stumbling in terror via that jail house prison
Cruelly manufactured for me below Hill Road South.
Mill Brook:
If you would look beyond those despotic fixities you would see
The dark pall of the industrial era has lifted, your brother
And I are freed from servitude, our water running clearer by the day.
Fish House Brook:
And you see this as consolation?
Do you not remember when the magnitude of our flow
Turned water wheels, had the force to overturn wagons
And shifted the lay of the land to sculpt our valleys?
Mighty Belisama, you must recall our glory days
Before they shifted your course from Watery Lane to Castle Hill,
Deformed our travails, forever destabilised our tables?
Belisama:
Quarrelsome brooks, stare firmly at the quintessence
Of your course and see all that remains constant is change.
Since the ice lords rode our backs, pitched us deeper
Into the frozen earth, and through the aeons before
Our wills and paths have never been wholly our own.
Fish House Brook:
That the principalities of nature shape us I do not disclaim.
But these men… with their yellow jackets
And heaving ploughs, excavators and cranes,
Winding cords, caterpillar rolls, drop down drains,
Their discernment as dense as a builder’s helmet,
Vision blank as a steel lid, they are numb as their machines.
Penwortham Brook:
Not like the orphans who worked my looms.
I remember their knocked legs stumbling to my bank,
How they stared into the rainbow of my polluted depths.
With wide white eyes they contemplated their horror in me,
Knowing not what they were or what I could be.
Fish House Brook:
At least then we were seen. Now the people stagger
By blind as drunks, ditching debris on our banks.
Mill Brook:
Humans… still given wholly to gods
They cannot see. Servile seeking invisible wealth
Not even gleaming gold. Their only idols strip plastic
Features on the screens, flip in pixels to wide dumb grins.
Fish House Brook:
The vapid screens suck out their lives.
They are not aware of, nor do they understand their sacrifice.
Whilst trapped within their drains we wither up and die.
Penwortham Brook:
Belisama, tell her that isn’t true.
Belisama:
How many years have men visited our banks?
Fish House Brook:
Well, I remember when we were treated with reverence.
Do you recall the long days spent by smiths at the forge,
The bold shatter of sparks, the bright ring of the hammer,
The beauty of gifts delivered in resonant ceremonies,
Swords, axes, heads crafted from stone and those of enemies
Whilst now all they drop in is litter and fag ends.
Penwortham Brook:
It was when the factories rose that the human race
Became effulgence and we it’s dumping ground.
Fish House Brook:
Now red fades to grey and the system is dying.
Their wonders drop, one by one, like falling dolls.
They roam the streets, jobless and desolate.
There is no hope in their eyes.
They have no strength left.
Belisama:
Bearers of the brooks, steerers of the streams,
Deliverers of my bright waters. Do not dismay!
Like the course of a river, times will change
We are bound into a whole with sea and rain.
With he who brings the tides come the waves.
I still commune with the lords of the glaciers
And they say we have not got long to wait.
In woodland damp, a shady dark divine
On aged slope the creeping ivy climbs.
Caressing thorn and dressing ash with vine
A poison maid spreading her locks sublime
Drapes kingdom fair with wanton waxen shine.
The deep earth’s lawless vagabond of joy
Cords heart shaped leaf where eldritch magic lives,
Ascends, protects the glamorous abode
Of fair folk ancient as the darkness of the wood.
Rooted fast at the foot of hallowed hill
In somber silence stands a leaning yew
Ghosts and needles shadowing its boughs
Whispers hanging sorrowful and true,
Of pageant stately passing at full moon.
Yew tree hides the underworld’s feared gateway
Beneath the haunted watching of its roots.
The wise and dead or reckless seek entry
Imploring the illustrious King of Faery.
~
His spectral shine shimmers white as moonlight
His hair floats fair about his phantom limbs
His warrior attire is black as night.
The eyes of the hunter of souls are grim
As the howl of his hounds on Annwn’s winds.
His dread black steed is a beast of the marsh
Dripping like the sea, his whinnying swims
Like a wetland dobbie bridging the worlds
And hurtling his way across the oak covered swamp.
The King’s pale face is black with wrath
For an eldritch dream killed by disbelief.
Souls who crossed to Annwn to be reborn
Stagnate in the gloom of apathy’s reign.
Through a mist of twilight doomed rides the King.
He travels the path of the Ribble’s old course
From the heart of the hill the death knell rings.
Decked in somber garments the fair folk march
Calling souls to the underworld with funeral spells.
Boggart:
Long grew the meadow grass, warm glowed the sun
Soft blew the breeze on the gold twitching fronds.
Seedy slight fescue in scattering throngs,
Dog’s tail and cat’s tail, rye grass and fox tail,
Cowslip and clover, sorrel and brome.
Lazy bright days for the faeries above
Skipping through splendour with pink petal wands
Light as the seeds and floating like cloth,
Whispering to flowers and enchanting the hours,
Whilst we fester beneath, shut out and cut off.
This field, now houses, was part of the moss.
The meadow belonged to the beasts of the bog.
A quagmire of paradise, bountiful haunt.
Sphagnum and fen sedge, sundew and star sedge,
Woundwort and dropwort, lizards and frogs.
Thick claggy peat soaked as full as a sponge,
Pools of deep water with bottomless grounds,
Dragonflies glitzed rippling spangling rounds.
We sat in, we soaked in, gloried and gloamed in,
‘til they drained it with ditches and sowed it with crops.
Now we dwell in the doom dark deep
Deprived of pool and moss and peat,
The corner and cranny we crookedly keep
Dried out and wasted, fates wangled, frustrated
‘til the land is returned to the bog and it’s beasts.
Chapter house meets silver frieze of dappled
clouds dipped in river. Beacon white sun lights
the margins of eyes; prior, pilgrim, traveller.
Holiday makers rush to shore, seekers
of ages dress lost walls. Broken healers
see a liminal sky, on a statue writ
in silver: Mars Nodontis. “Be our healer.
Beside the lapping tides and flashing sky,
Cloud Maker, fix our wounds and make us whole.
Return this no-time to a holy day.”
Full moon breaks the rushes,
quivering lips soft whiskered brush the water,
hair line trail traces black velvet muzzle
which moistens, smacks and laps,
heavy glug of oesophagus
tugs water to the bowels of a dread black creature.
The beast drinks deep, shaggy hide
long and twitching skirts agile cloven feet.
His saucer red eyes hold star glow infernal.
Head raised dripping, he speaks a gargling tale
of strangled marshes, dried out mosslands,
shrunken brooks and pools abandoned,
eternal thirst his cruel domain and an endless lust for riders
to sink beneath the skin of a world unintelligible
to one deep as peat and old as the glaciers.
His lips close slapping. His burning eyes blink.
With a fish-like leap he slips below the water.
Belisama changing Queen
Of the Ribble’s shining waters
Shaper of the dales and plains,
Towns and cities and their dreams.
A sparkling sight of sweet repose
You speak serenely under daylight
Shallows shifting playful hint
At beauties strange as subtle tides.
Your hurtling force rocks roaring stones
When fair folk blow their horns at midnight
Enigmas flow in endless throes
Your current’s drowning change or die.
Changing queen of transformation
Streams unite within your basin
Bridges cross- worlds in collision
Town and dale and rushing dream.
The Sanctuary of Vindos 