Casting Shadows

A Murder of Crows heading your way…

Shadow

It’s all black, black, black

and silver and blue.
Metallic blue like heron’s wings, like foil in sunlight.

Velvet feathers,
a hood draped over a sunken face withered and hidden.

Piercing blue eyes, like a juvenile crow.

Heavy feathers strung with blackthorn runes and neck hung with elder beads and dried berries, fly agaric shrivelled under the sun.

Walks with a lope, twitches and hops ready for flight.

Hooked claws, or cloven hooves or big black boots, heavy soled and dripping with buckles.

Silver more silver and gold more gold. Magpie hungry for metal.

Wings folded beneath raven cowl –
huge white angel’s wings, shredded at the edges, pierced and painted in places, red ochre and ultramarine.

A huge heart thuds quick, step by step,
beat by beat.
Slow then and so slow out in the wilds

or by the coast
no one to see

a hot cloaca that glows beneath stone washed denim below the rolled up jeans.

Scaly stalks instead of knees, matt black and dusty.
and if you ever get close enough haha you’ll see the sides of the face are etched

with symbol, scars burned into thick weathered flesh,

teeth flash below the crook of a shining beak,
a live wolf who almost never speaks but stalks prey into the forests

and late night howls, blue murder, in the shadows of city streets.

Cackling laughter at polite distress,
extreme delight in vomiting,
disorder and undress.

Hands we don’t see knit patterns beneath dark materials, secretly weaving the air,
moving energy, making tangible what isn’t there.
Cuts out lies, painful lies from the suffering,

reaches deep into the soil of you
touches the depths of your despair
with such eloquence and tenderness
you feel the grace but barely know the hand is there.

Hungry always hungry
and fierce and so free,
stealing like a magpie and giving generously of goods and other treasures,

carved of bone and tied with twine, and tiny foraged morsels that embody the sublime.

This beast has no mercy but its thin skin pulses with compassion.

It tips its head at a curious angle
both wrists enchained with heavy metal bangles.
Black lines beneath the eyes, soot, and blood.

A leather piece containing all the bits and bobs swings from the feather guarded neck like a plate of armour.

Ducking and swaying in the wind then clamping down encased beneath its wings. Keeps you at bay before

it stretches and lifts
the vast and tattered things,

heavy aching bones

too long under cover
the crow with angel wings
sends leaves and sticks and litter flurrying away

as they flap and fly,

and rise

slowly, gloriously,

into the sky.

This is an another part of my completion of old projects. These words aren’t necessary but they’re here so… if you want more…

I see you, you who have been rejected as terrifying, forbidden and dangerous, foreign, overwhelming, too big, too much, too small, not enough etc etc etc. Even though maybe you want me to fuck off and not see you! I am you and you are me. I am the light and the shadow dancing in the moment. Where is my attention?

Shapes (or a word like this) emerging from the shadows, attending to these, seeing them, staying with them solid and steady. Bringing awareness to these energies, these sensations at the body level, social level, to orient in relationship to them from your centre, to let them express, release, reorganise as needed. Noticing when I am pulled into the dance. Coming back to my centre, moving rooted from my centre. A hearth of warmth and welcome is available, tending it nurturing it, holding the firelight and shadows dancing, transforming. Breathing.

Crows and angels on the battle field tending to the whole.

Here you are disturbing the universe with your great big light showing up what was hidden in the shadows.

It’s all there anyway.

I was walking the dog with my neighbour and she said she liked to go to Eucharist once a week just to get down on her knees. (I do this all the time outside of a Christian context just to help me take the pressure off and remember my place in the cosmos). She said to me, “I feel like telling you what I was told this week.” She shared this verse with me and I feel like sharing it with you –

‘The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world.’ (1 John 4:4)

If the notion of God nips for you, then think of it like this – the oneness that is in you (or is you) is greater than what is in the world. (And the world includes your conditioned mind and your conditioned soma).

Anyway that’s plenty – Thank you for attention and being. Thank you for your dance and for the stillness from which the dance arises.

Here is a song because my cup runneth over: