adventures of a tired bookwyrm
(petals #1)
The world is interlocking,
detail building on detail like petals on a rose
all of it in motion like swallows flocking
in shifting perfect patterns across the sky.
Sit very still in the center
or a corner; it is the same place for you.
Be quiet. Your heart lies still as the naked winter.
The whole sky folds in fractal blooms.
Fold the sky into a crane
cradled in cupped hands
tired cars creep down their lane
scraping snow dark bands.
May-fly snowflakes dance the wind –
students, scarfed, scuff by.
And at the board (your prayers please send!)
prop’s bloody end draws nigh.
Edmund Pevensie: brother, bully, traitor. Aslan died for his betrayal. Always my least favorite of the Pevensie kids, always the one I was a little uncomfortable with. Who likes Edmund, after all? The bitter tang of his betrayal carries over through the Narnia saga. But today I want to talk about Edmund of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in relation to his siblings – Edmund and Lucy, the first two Pevensies into the wardrobe; Edmund and Peter, the fraught relationship of brothers. Let’s talk about that long, gloomy hall where a boy stood and gave away his siblings for the promise of candy and a crown.
Continue reading “Words Snarled or Swallowed Back: Exploring Edmund Pevensie”
What the writer says:
Wakeful here, we trespass!
Wakeful here, we walk a foreign world
pale-sky palace built not for us
best left to bloodless voices
warmthless wakeful wind-sprites
screaming down their waste.
What the writer means:
I’m COLD and TIRED and I want to be HIBERNATING.
When the first leaves change color, call the herds in from the fields. Stable your horses, corral your cattle, bring dogs and cats and goats and stray children inside. When the valley is striped with fire and golden drifts spread across the fields, the dragons come.
I’ve been here before. You’ll make it safe through the woods if you stay on the path, that’s the rule, but there was never a path here in the first place. Dark branches tangle overhead and the trees are different this time around but the shadows are the same, thick and cloying and very very quiet. Continue reading “Red Riding Hood, lost”
Once upon a time our princess was placed under a terrible curse at her christening.
(You know this story.) Continue reading “Sleeping With Beauty”
memory of a place you’ve never been: green-gold sea
You have been climbing – reach and catch and pull and swing – for long enough that the day’s work lost its grip on your shoulders and slid off and has been left somewhere far below. Long enough that your mind rests comfortably in the rough bark beneath fingers and the rhythm of rough breath, and restless worries are left below.
I hope if the stars are laughing at us it is gently, gently, because they know everything will turn out all right in the end and this was all all all a twisting turning cliff-tumbled footpath to that final sweetness. I hope if the stars are laughing at us it is gently, gently, because we are so young and tired and wild and so afraid that the world is ending and they have watched the word’s heartbeat stutter and steady and stutter and steady and it would take more than this to shake such ancient bones. I hope if the stars are laughing at us it is gently, gently, because oh, I cannot bear anything else, but they sing a tapestry older then pain and younger then righteousness and surely they have watched long enough to begin to understand what it is to hurt and cry and love and try. I hope if the stars are laughing it is gently, gently, gently.