I Did It All For Blessed She

She whose barley hair was cut
and changed for living gold
did bid me fare out from her hut
into the mighty cold.
My father took me down to treasure
his father passed to him,
and with my brother, we did measure
out the boons to meet the din
Of endless Winter, tundra's plains,
across whose storms we trekked.
We strove the lovely maiden gain
whose fortunes cold trolls wrecked.
And through it all, you all may see
I did it all for Blessed She.

For Blessed She, belov'd of jewels,
whose charms I heard from Sif.
Twelve trolls I challenged to a duel
upon the ice, beside my skiff
Beyond whose bounds the wretched hag
did spit out dire curses,
I downed all twelve, whose wits were lag,
then with my words did worse her.
Won back the gems the maiden 'dored
that on a golden string did thread,
then waked her brother, blessed Lord
of Harvests who had seemed near dead.
I took her then upon my schoon,
The Gods to bless I gave this boon.

A year or more the Moon did after
ride me in his ivory yacht
up to starry heaven's rafters
and there a riddle-contest fought
With scrivened geezer, throwing puns
my wit could barely answer
then found that castle kingdom run
by He, who's Heaven's Master.
He showed me all the awed estates
that glitter in that land,
with praise where he had once berate
in questions now he took my hand.
For Love he opened all his Gates,
and Blessed She became my Mate.

The sword I'd won on misty paths,
when down I went to nether lands
with blood I'd spilt in my great wrath
that ran in veins of royal Halfdan,
and on the haft of great Mjollnir,
cut its thund'ring wood in two
the Gods' retreat behind Fjolnir
made them tremble in dark rue ;
yet word upon the winds did utter
he who'd bring the blade,
the hand of She who hearts did flutter
would a match be made.
That precious edge that right my wrongs,
I gladly give to sing Her songs.

And so my Bride she'll rightful be:
I, who weathered storms for She.

Odr's Sonnet of Lament to Freya

Tossed within the waves, for you I wept,
the cold sea gave no consolation.
Grasping at what love from you I kept,
the hardened deformed shape of my bastard nation
Swept over and changed that gracious form
whose beauties once you kisses-praised.
A flotsam to each winter's storm
the sea, in rage, like mine, did raise.
The shame of fools who toss their heirlooms
know not shame beside my crimes
which ripped me from thy lovely, fair womb
as Dietrich did our son in dark times.
Though in my rage I won this banish,
Lost have I not this love -- won't vanish.

Odr's Confession

Have I this day to you my love confessed,
making clear this mirror in which your heart
doth shine as the moon within the sun be dressed,
and the days refresh, despite my long depart?
Have I this night in blackest coal of murk
shown how your charms shine forth like stars?
As sun behind the gates of dawn doth lurk,
behind your absence gloam your powers.
Have I this morn your mourning's weep
wiped clean with hands that love you still?
From deepest wells the love still seep,
as this confession shows my will.
For though you think me gone and parted,
These words, ring true, show love not thwarted.

Some Say Love Is Dead

Some say Love is dead, but it is we who are dead to Love, who ought be served ; and we, the rebels, thirst in drought for it, and what for nought. Say never She forsook us, when we have shunned her from our homes and hearts. Many upon a season, She, riding fairy-train in the night, hath knocked upon which doors might answer, passing by those locked to her visits. Upon Her neck ride golden those kings gifted to stand within Her graces ; and well you might ask, hath your nation earned a place near to Her, or, having given over all or most to Her rival counterfeit standing in lust of gold who, with seduction, takes the nations upon her shoulders as the pelts of a huntsman, willingly declared forfeit? Do not ask for fruits where you have not watered the tree ; beg not for juice when you have burned the orchards and cast out the gardeners. Homes must be full of love from the first womb's welcome, and congresses of law must lay down righteous boons where love may find its soil in justice. Poets must sing of Her, not alone, but in the forum, their masterspiece given fund from the king's treasury, and then, these true words spoken, the folk must abide by them and give their pledge, so that words have world's backing, and are not vain puffs of air, coins cast from a bankrupt mint, and earn no honor in Her eyes. I know that sad smirk you show, the rotted soul of one who thinks such things dreams, and you wonder why in the jaded smoke of neglect's soot the shining glory of the cat-drawn maiden showeth not Her majesty? This is not a matter one man alone may make, for the fabric of our fibres are sewn together, and their tapestries read hymns or curses to She whose blessings we ought seek before declaring Her dead. She reads those long scrolls our deeds of love or hate declare, and published by the nations, her many a fairy servant-maid distributes what boons are deserved, and you may judge by the harvests how She has been pleased. We gather our gambles from the preset odds grown obscure in the times before we met our would-be beloveds, and the chain of those who have handled and handed on the gem we seek well determines its polish and lustre, or powder of cracked chips. Oh, Lady Love may well give pardons, out to homes where she is honored, yet these are but exceptions to the general rule, a welfare distributed to the nations according to their merits as such, and how Love was met in the seasons' rounds of holy feast days. These are not light matters. Many give lip-service but no service beyond, and those who are not willing to plow and sow and thresh in her lush and wondrous fields have little wonder at meagre harvests. Have you watched the harvestman sweat? Have you seen the oxen toil? Where the soil has been stolen from the forest's natural orchards and vineyards, such labors are needed to eke the fruits from dirt too long sunbaked and left to desolation. Have you the strength, the courage, the faith to imagine an Old Growth love in climax state? Let go of mowings which cut down Love's growings. She seeks to seed your hearts with succession's fruits leading on to those misty sunlit forests where elves dance, but her fair folk will not foot-fall rumba on barren plains where life has fled for corruption. Do the Lady service, and call your kinsmen back to true devotion.

The Lovely

The lovely is a land,
a kingdom calling out, wooing
our wonder to gather in waves
of bliss and belonging that lull
the tristened heart to heal.
There is a realm entire of thorns :
Nor fruit nor flower blushes blood
But prick and pain and desolation.
Then numb, and thrashed,
the thorn-torn soul retreats
and wonders why of incarnation.
Breath has been broken,
a branch bough-breached to dust and damned dry.
Where wonders why, why wonders soul
in weeping, dry, the wetness faded :
fades the frail cartilage and callous to atrophy.
There are armies dessicate
juice-drained flesh to dry in zombie-walking,
why-wishing in the dry, whyless woe-lands,
and some so cynic jaded to blaspheme
that gnawed need as this the norm.
No.
There is a land, The Lovely,
flow, and float ; glide, and glow,
where welcome back the winds our breath
in breathe and blessed freshened grace,
to give our soul its celebrate heirlooms.
In love, in love, that lovely trance
that takes you to that land of lovely,
dream the doorway, trance the entrance :
O wild words, woven on a poet's lipped loom, take
Me there, me there, where dance is driven
ever on by flow and fire's
surge most warm that blooms the soul's flesh!
Refresh, refresh, and breathe most dear.
Here is the hollow space within the world's cavern
Whence world takes its wielding breath, to birth
the strong-pound stream rolling flow of full life.
Heaven halved us, envoys made
to make the middle journey, joy
in shuttling, courier, there now here.
We are the waters' carrier,
the well-seeking boys and girls weal to world, from dreams.
These chiseled zeros of breath,
caressed nothings, words
from world to world are ways :
well-reaching, shaped sounds seek
and find that flow to Lovely's land.
What else but lips
that kiss, and tongue that slips
o'er lips of lovers has the power
breath to shape in sensuous grope, to list
and lure the soul in hopeful spell, to bliss?
But this? These lips? These lips.
These slips of sound in rapid rhythm
roaring river toss the soul to this, this bliss.
The Land of Lovely, lovely land
where dance and dream queen-crown Love in worship's pageants.
Bow and bowing, down
to beauty's bosom blessed Lady, Love.
There to Sabbat, soul tends : heal.
The wholeness of spirit's caressed flesh.
Embrace of breath, in the whole souls' congress
coming forward, line by line, to bless,
in bow and kiss, the queen, when She
soul-song of Lovely Land long song shares,
and sway,
sway the souls in waving throng
thigh-strong arms embrace.
This grace and boon is a birth's right written
royal and sealed on the soul's song ; when sung,
the word bewilded,
trance's charm spellbound takes us
there, The Lovely, land of grace
where half our human heart belongs
while living ; the wise live half home
alive, luck collecting, world to weal
with wish of someday soul
homeland wholed, beyond this life,
to live in ever, land : The Lovely.

Heterogenealogy, or, Frithweaving

What is the genealogy of the heterogeneous? How are we related to even that which is different? How does marriage, through love, unite that which was divided? In frithweaving, heritages are united that had been apart. The children's blood is the mixed blood of the parents, and if the parents have married more than once, there is shared heritage, through the common fund of blood, across the different lines.

Let me be more specific. Let us say a woman weds a Vietnamese, and gives forth issue, then weds a German Catholic and gives forth issue, and then weds an Orthodox Jew and gives forth issue. Those siblings now share in the heritage of each, through the common fund of blood of the mother. Even though the German has not a drop of Jew nor Vietnamese in his genes, the web has been woven. The wyrd is binding. You cannot separate me from my brothers and sisters, both literally, and through extension, metaphorically.

Whether issue or no, love is always an exchange of blood. What I love, writ small or large runs through my veins, too. Heterogenealogy connects us. It does not separate us. It allows us to explore how wide our connections really are. It invites us to investigate and embrace the mongrel within, for have been tribes' tendrils woven ever since the first dawn of days.

Let us hear 'dominant' and 'recessive' through the ears of music, a dynamic strain in a symphony full of many chords and polyphonics. One tradition may indeed lead any one of us. Very well, let it lead, but there are many guests at the table. Let them also be honored. Let toasts be raised to the guests and their kin.

Let us never forsake those whom love has brought us, atomizing them not, but loving, in whatever full struggle love truly means, that matrix which bore them forth into our arms. What made them possible to be let us love; and if we must grapple, let us grapple, and if we must let go, let us let go. The bonds of love stay true.

There is no such thing as a half-sibling. A half-sibling is a whole sibling. The beloved is all the beloved.

You may see this frith-weaving in the Ing symbol, which in its expanded form sews together two threads, just as the helices of DNA, and in its compact form shows the unity of that union which has been effected. This Ing appelation belongs not just to Freyr, but is a patronymic passed down to all who are beloved of him, and who live that love, frith-weaving, that Frey and Freya represent. Thus the Ynglings at heart are those who weave frith between tribes, found no greater expression than that Yngling Odr, Frey's beloved brother-in-law, whose rich macramed genealogy Hyndla sang to Freya. Odr is the soul. We have risen up through this genetic matrix to tie together tribes in frith, and wed our way towards Love herself.

This gives the lie to racialism, which tries to play a symphony as a monotone. Let us call in the fortes in our song, indeed, but no bad spell shall dispel the wonder of the rippling harmonics giving depth to our strong song.

Gifts of Sorrow

Gifts of sorrow you have been given, gifts against your will, so that your soul might long to sing. A lament is a method, a way of holding close feelings that wombed may blossom into depths of poignancy and life. Regrets nurtured are the seeds of prayer, and prayer is a gateway to fulfillment beyond fulfillment or loss.

Love is that longing for what has been lost, for in love there are ecstatic unions and separations of agony. Who will find soul without love? When will love consent to uninterrupted happiness, for She weaves, and the thread moves away and then sews back together. We are apprentices, our flaws the fault in the fabric, our learnings the darnings of frayed threads. It is when love is gone that love is tested. Will love return? Will She come back to us? Have we created a noble, nurtured nest for her within our hearts? For with falcon wings, she flies, soaring. If hearts are ready, she alights and lays eggs. Will you make your boughs bowers?

Melancholy is a mode of making love She knows well, for she sees the sorrow and the struggle unavoidable in growth, and is filled with great, magnanimous compassion. In between the seedling and the oak are dark days borne alone, trials in the forest's jury of peers, reachings and missings, and sheer holdings on through the storms that make one strong and sometimes need healing.

Celebration is not the only mode of knowing love, though She loves a good feast. In loss, we find her depth ; in loss, we do her service, and penance done to love plants seeds of future pleasures.

O, beneath the sky, you will wonder, How did I survive? How could one give reckon for how one bore the varied tests that come it seems from some sadness called necessity? All you know is, awakened, you have survived, as if planted on a different shore through swathes of fog.

Life finds a way.

This Love whispers, a smile slightly breaking from Her seeming-Stoic lips ; and it is a song She sings to pines seeking light through the darkened and crowded canopy ; seeds stretching tendril in the dark and moist, hoping blind for sunlight ; larvae planted clay and loam to find their way to molting. O tender primate, weeping behind that stolid mask, you are not alone. Life is struggle, and finds a way.

If this song has come to your ears, you too have found a way, and you shall. But spurn not your sorrow ; it may guide the way in dark times, for Love hides patient behind the mask of regret. Her hair was once tied in knots, too ; her eyes forlorn and far away ; her flesh cold and longing for winter's end ; her heart broken and wondering when the beloved might arrive at last. Sing her songs. She knows. You will find it is true. She knows.

Wild Prayers

As a poet I feel we have no business but to pray. But prayer is wild, and never contained by any religion. Prayer is necessary, because of hope, despair, loss, love, longing. One might pray to anything, or anyone, or nothing at all. Prayers are poems sent by the heart. They are addressed to someone absent, who is yet present, and in the longing one may speak true and beautiful words.

Prayers make us human, cast hopeless hopes out onto the ether, extend care and regret, whist and desire, reverie and affection upon the air, sent to objects of contemplation, of lost belonging, of broken bonds found strong beyond the breaking. Prayer is human, because the heart must speak its thoughts, and needs world as audience, even in a hidden grotto.

Trees, rocks, running rivers bear witness ; broad swathes of wind-swept sky bear witness ; gulls and sparrows, toads and bears bear witness, and what the earth has heard, her creatures pass on invisible, through unseen matrices of the heart that plasmatic crackle through the loam and on the wind.

Such is the conceit of the heart, its own special delusion, a delusion to which we are, by virtue of having soul, entitled. One never knows all the prayers on the air which reach one unknown, except if one reaches out and imagines them, and in imagining, receives them. We are foolish beings, and such folly is our right of pride.

The modern world has it wrong. We are not "talking to ourselves". We are talking to the wind, and what the wind hears, it does not forget. Let us not forget the prayers cast out onto the wind, for the Breath's Father, full wisdom working, wanders there unseen.

Hearts know.

A Skald Finds His Path

I was a youth, and off the path I stepped, off, and onto mine. I chose this way, this way half-human, half after elvish traces in the woods.

I saw the light writing arabic-shimmer on the surface of the waters, and saw the path of beauty, and said, Yes. And Lady Love, eyes sad and smiling, said, Are you sure? To walk this path brings sorrow.

But the beauty was intoxicating. I fell in love with hypnotic words and dreams, however weird.

Lady Love, lingering, stardust blood-blooming fingers beckoning, said, Are you sure? To walk this path is to know great solitude, and the many will pass by, laughing, caught in their dallies, and you will feel longing.

My heart now hesitated, my throat gulped. The price of beauty was costly. The cost of knowing an elvish life was to bear the pains and burdens of difference. To look upon the many, and be set apart, by a destiny which calls out as if a spirit's voice off in the hinterlands. I sighed.

She said, these sacrifices may be hard to bear. You will know joys beyond joys, sorrows beyond sorrow, yet pleasures and boons that fruit the plush of the mainstream roads may long be lost to you.

Yet I danced, I opened mouth and tasted sunlight, my hands held up water and watched it wondrous drip into liquid pools of clear flow. The fire spoke hymns on the waves, and my eyes curious longed to know the poems spoken. Yes, I said to beauty, yes.

Yet one time more our Lady Love did speak to me, and asked with warning, Are you sure? For you will love as few love, and I will feed you fruits from the most ripened, luscious tree, full of drunken juice ; and yet you, you shall know the loss of love many a time. You will hold the corn in Spring, and mourn its husk in Fall, and being a knight in my service, those who seek a normal man may come, and charmed, give magic kisses in the night, yet marvelous creatures, soulful animals, move on to ripen in the herd. You will have to hold this sorrow. You must walk through deserts to taste the thorny cactus fruit whose flowers open only once a season. Then love may pass for some time. And child, you may be bitter. Think not the sweet fruits are the only ones you will taste. Maror and wormwood gruits brew in elvish ale, too.

And youth, fool, folly tossing skip o'er cliff, I said, not knowing what may come, not feeling all the losses many, Yes, yes, and yes.

And here I am three decades hence, and only now this pact becomes plain in the passage of time. Some destinies are doomed, others are chosen, yet they are destined all the same. I shudder when I look upon youth and ponder the peril they everyday face in chains of choices : to bind, to unbind, each a choice that opens worlds, closes others. Even the luckiest life enfolds and embraces serious tragedies, or at least near brushes against them. Life is full of close calls, too close for comfort. The juice of youth is melancholy, reaching in hope for unseen fulfillment, and you can see it in their desperate, eager eyes : hungry for life, playing in the peril, careless and trusting and wound-tending onwards.

What a risk and gamble is life! How easy to fall away, to lose one's star in the fog. Yet if one chances to survive, the astral realms are forgiving. One might find the star again. But nothing is ever the same. Every choice lays down that doom. Play well in the peril, youth, take care : the spells you cast now are prayers the Gods will surely reckon.

I Made Love To the Sea Through Thee

I made love to the sea through thee ;
I made love to the sea.
In coming and going,
I set my heart upon the waves
and words cast out to please thee
whose nets did draw the water's welcome
before I came to tease thee.
I made love to the sea through thee ;
I made love to the sea.
Nor here nor there,
the sea will 'test,
my heart is ever wandering.
The kisses of thy fairy lips
did ever set me pondering.
I made love to the sea through thee ;
I made love to the sea.
Your heart was weird,
your heart was soft,
we often shared our dreams.
The memory of the love we shared
is not less than it seems.
I made love to the sea through thee ;
I made love to the sea.
It seems at loss,
an exile now,
my heart may ever be.
The sound of singing
waves does sting
and make me think of thee.
I made love to the sea through thee ;
I made love to the sea.
I made love to the sea through thee ;
I made love to the sea.

Svipdag's Sonnet, I

The moon mocks me, bids me tend
down through labyrinthine caverns
there to seek the world's deep end
and drink the draughts of Mimir's tavern.
Yet in my mind I know I'll never
of that Well of Wisdom drink
for only souls more worthy ever
allowed are over that font's brink.
My lunacy doth draw me down
the edge of blade more wondrous seek
that victory bringing when is found
make blood of father's killer leak.
For destiny I must fulfill
like siren's call, beyond my will.

Blood and Bones and Breath Make World

Still hammer at the foundry,
the red-hot iron pounded,
tongs in hand, to forge
a form of voice and glyph
that speaks what Saga sayeth:
with the eye of Milton made,
with the bones of Blake invibrate,
with the speech of Shakespeare
warped to wyrd of Bragi's craft,
Ymir laid out upon the anvil :
blood and bones and breath make world.
Blood and bones and breath make world.

Heimdall's Children Wept in Chains

They spat slander in blood and curse-
calling down from the ship-lord's son's
oath to ever free those tied in chains
when they, enthralled by gold's calling,
mired the pine-and-oak-carved crafts
given bless by the Mere-king's foam-fingered hands
to sail seaward as floating temples of frith,
by hauling as cargo Frigga's handmaiden
Africa's children in chains to live as thralls,
and wash upon the waves, to spill vein's bless
slaughter into the tossing fish-bed's depths,
the freedom-lord's father insulted by carry
strong men and women worthy
over the pulsed bosom of brine. Kidnapped!
No crime to call for enthrallment ; forefathers
felled in graves long ago in Saxon slaughter
at hands of Charlemagne silent cry up the yew-yards
how they, once thousand years past, trail
of Saxon tears were folk-removed by tyrants
quick on stripping their heathen hearts of faith,
yet not across waters against their will, even they!
The burning of the Irmunsil, its ashes cast
venom-virile into the waves, the shocked cries
of the broken backs at knee with weep and gnashing
cleaved and burnt soil broken from the homeland's heart,
what more these battered peasants of Ethiopian stock,
proud scions of kings and woodland wizards, endured,
anguished, and silent-moaned, upon the desecrated
temple-grounds of Fridlef's porpoise-highways!
Will usura's spell silence the sound of Magna Charta
rush spiral through Saxon veins, singing virile,
so soon as a slave sets foot on soil
of Saxon land it leaves its chains
unbound with British freedom in full?
Invidia's voice screech-cackles, and screaming,
drowns out the ancient rights to ruin,
to fill the coffers of the cargo carriers,
laying down that law of blood broken boomerang,
whereby six hundred thousand sons of Albion
shall brother-fight-brother fall to fulfill
the iron-clad order of Urd : a gift
for a gift, a life for a life ; and so we might guard
our lives with right, and good judgements, if wise.
Wise too many of our struggling sires were not,
and Loki's lyrical tongue, with laughter,
gave guidance to lawyers to trick with lies ;
and the Wolf lay unbound,
Heimdall's children wept in chains,
the coils of the sea-serpent strangled
wrenched their proud limbs and sinews
to choking, and the whip, and the whip,
and the whip ever-lashing ceased not
to sorrow those souls so life-longing
for freedom our father's fathers denied.
Yet fiery wod and will for freedom
worked up storms in speech of some,
who wrath lightning-beard hammer brought down
the bold words, "Abolish!", and John Brown heeded,
Thor smiling proud. It was a strong day for old Gods then,
when the blood boiled free in British-born veins,
reins-snip raiding, and rile, as in Roman days past,
when wolf-clad kings would cross the Rhine,
and fire the fortress in flames as offering
to Gods who hated chains in every sinew
of their Godflesh, for whom bindings
were meant to bind only those who'd bite
the folk. And Thom Jefferson wrote,
in that strong sounding of independence,
to rob a folk of freedom is crime, breeds more
crime and crime on top of that, to blood
and open tyranny. Saga will speak :
Mother Earth, open up archives,
unheard songs, vanquished voices, rise,
let the skald hear the calls,
so we may speak the sooth that cures.
Truth has its own liniments, spread broadly,
squeezed deeply, undoes bruise and wound.
May the hard legacy's lessons
never fail the minds of men again.