An Exercise in Eccentricity

In my last post, I asked some questions and promised to give my own answers in my next post. This is that post.

The questions remain open to be answered, though. I really do need some outside input to help break me out of my usual creative patterns.

So, if you intend to answer these questions, please do so BEFORE READING THIS POST! I don’t want to influence your answers.

That said, here goes nothin:

1. Make up a constellation and a brief story for it.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… there was a great wolf spirit and a great serpent spirit roaming over a primordial world, and they were brother and sister. They were sent to shape the world for creatures who would come after them. 

Now, the wolf was an orderly creature who liked patterns and measures, while his sister serpent loved all things unpredictable and chaotic. For a time, they worked harmoniously, each one seeing the beauty in the other’s plans, but after a while their ideas came more and more into conflict. Unwilling to compromise, they parted ways, each one traveling over the surface of the world and shaping it according to their own desires.

When the siblings had covered the world, they began to run across and change eachother’s designs. As time went on, it seemed as if they would completely undo their own work and leave the world as formless as when they had begun. And so the Great Spirit reached down and scooped them up to release them in the sky where they would have more space to shape and form and would not interfere with the creatures that were to come.

The eye of the wolf is the fixed polar star, ever reliable. The serpent runs through the chaotic band of many stars, and her eye is red and inconstant.

2. What is your favorite holiday (excluding Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Easter) and  why?

 4th of July.  I absolutely love fireworks, and New Years is too insane. The 4th is, at least around here, a laid-back holiday filled with grilled food, family, and explosions. Sparklers, and elaborate fireworks displays never fail to fascinate and awe me. Thank you, Chinese inventors! I am also fond of my home nation and like to have a set time to celebrate its existence.

3. Name an object you would like to see featured in a story

 I want to read a story that involves a magical lint brush. Why? Because the non-magical kind don’t work nearly well enough to solve my cat-hair issues.

4. make up a name for a spell and tell me what it does

Brightsnap: brightsnap is an alchemical transmutation creating silvery beads that explode on sharp impact, exuding a blinding light for as long as a minute. Because honest uses of brightsnap are rare, it has been outlawed and knowledge of the ingredients and process have been suppressed. On the black market, the beads now fetch a high price. 

5. Choose a plant and make up a symbolic meaning for it

I’ve been doing this one for a while, so I will pick one I haven’t yet added to my list. 

Trillium: a meeting of ways/convergence

6. What is your favorite ghost/folk/scary story (can be humorous or not)

This is a tough one for me. You already have my favorite ghost poem, so I must think of something else. I am very fond of several E. A. Poe stories and of some of the folk-tales I have come across. Poe’s work is pretty well-known, though, so perhaps I should highlight the latter. I have little tangible reason as to which folktales and ghost stories speak to me, and which don’t. Here are two very different ghost-stories, both with roots reaching far back into human history.  The first one is a vengeful ghost tale, and the second is a sad one.

Phoenix

Be-kind-rewrite’s Inspiration Monday nudged my muse in a terribly melodramatic way. Apologies in advance for the levels of angst, but the prompt was “can’t stop crying” so it was bound to be either angsty or filled with onions.

In the Center is a thing that weeps. In the darkness surrounding her now, her feathers and her tears are light. Her children return when their fires burn out. It’s over their corpses she weeps, folding them beneath her wings like eggs.

And there, against the mother flame, their life returns only for them to leave again; flying off into the void, bringing heat and light, but leaving her in the Center with her tears.

We have light and life because she can’t stop crying. Yet I have to wonder if one day we will learn the meaning of life without pain.

.

Gothic Galatea

Disclaimer:  I do not consider myself a poet.

While I love reading poetry and admire the craft of “language distilled,” my own efforts are conducted in a lazy manner. I use verse to vent and play, and I know enough true poets to recognize the difference between their work and my own. I thank my mother and my other Literature teachers and professors for educating me in the theory and forms of poetry, for showing me how to read on multiple levels and for steering me away from some of the worst pitfalls.

When I do write verse, its form is usually spur-of-the-moment. I love rhythm; I avoid rhymes.  I have, for assignments, written sonnets, haiku, and one horrible sestina that will never see the light of day (I would burn it, save that it reminds me of the consequences of literary disasters), but I have never felt the desire to write these for myself.  Every few years, however, rhymes seem to build up in me like water behind a dam and they must be released.

What follows is a rare, rhymed verse that I created the last time my rhyme-reservoir reached critical mass. I only write such gothic things when I am in a peculiarly merry mood. Who knows why? Anyway, the perfectionist in me knows that it is quite flawed. I nevertheless find it entertaining to read (it was entertaining to write, too) and I thought I would share. I like it best when I read it aloud.

.

Heart of Stone
.
One sharp twist and the heart is broke.
Of stronger stuff had it been made
Then, mayhap, still intact it laid,
But no, the organ’s split and grayed
And all who know should fear.
.
For once this heart be shatteréd,
There’s naught to hold the fury back.
The mind, pain-raw, will turn to black
And ne’er again will offer pact
Of mercy, love, or peace.
.
The night sky split with lighted bolt
And those too near, they heard her scream.
The moon looked on with faded gleam
To see the breaking of her dream
And how her body bent.
.
Fell eyes of flame and empty coal,
Sharp claws, and hands of icy flesh,
Long hair that leaves and bones enmesh,
And heart that twists and cracks afresh,
Do all a monster make.
.
One sharp twist and the heart is broke.
Of stronger stuff had it been made
Then, mayhap, still intact it laid,
But no, the organ’s split and grayed
And all who know should fear.
.
For selfish love he formed her first.
No woman-flesh could satisfy
His critical, appraising eye,
So golem made, to make him sigh
With admiration true.
.
He did not count her soul to be
As free as his, or anyone’s,
And jealousy in him, begun
When her love by another won,
Did take her from him far.
.
For once this heart be shatteréd,
There’s naught to hold the fury back.
The mind, pain-raw, will turn to black
And ne’er again will offer pact
Of mercy, love, or peace.
.
And so he did her lover take
Unto the courts and thence to hang,
And heedless of the dirge she sang,
Dragged her back to prison’s clang
Of bars to keep her still.
.
But little did her maker fear
The fury in her shattered heart.
Her prison she then rent apart
And unto him she did impart
Her rage and pain in full.
.
One sharp twist and the heart is broke.
Of stronger stuff had it been made
Then, mayhap, still intact it laid,
But no, the organ’s split and grayed
And all who know should fear.
.
His broken body then she left,
To roam the woods and forests wild.
For every woman, man, and child
Who finds her now, and is beguiled,
She is a certain death.
.
Curséd is the man who brought this
Creature life and failed to see
That she, like all who would be free,
Never a soulless doll could be.
He doomed us to his fate.
.
For once this heart be shatteréd,
There’s naught to hold the fury back.
The mind, pain-raw, will turn to black
And ne’er again will offer pact
Of mercy, love, or peace.