The son of my heart, not of my body
Came to me with the midsummer sun.
A babe abandoned by a dark goddess
Too confused by trickster gods to know which
Road was true.
She left him to The Norns
Whose thread led a path from
Orange County to the dry East:
A stronger & more potent chaparral:
The offspring of mountain & desert.
His smile sang loudly, but he
Was silent for so long.
No word would bloom from his
Rosebudded lips.
And then the symbols of language
Bewitched him.
Images of apples, balls, & cats
Lit a fire in his head.
No bloodied eye or nine
Days hanging from a tree, but skipping
And laughing & sweet tones of
Ah Buh Kuh spilled from his mouth.
The revelation of letters combined
Imparted knowledge to his tongue.
T, W, O taught him to speak two.
L, O, V, E – love.
The solved equation of letters
Unravelled the mysteries of speech
And with them, a world of runes
And symbols. Greek, Coptic,
Cyrillic. He spends his days &
Nights with these friends: α (alpha), γ (gamma),
Ⲋ (soou), & Г (ghe), bending
His fingers and arms into their likenesses.
Ampersand & hyphen swirl before his eyes
And dance upon the page
Awakening the verbum that was always within.
Our little messenger god –
No trickster, but seer & prophet
Here to learn language backward
And teach with pen and tongue.
In the beginning was the letter
And the letter tripped from
The mouth of a three-year-old-boy
And the word formed from his breath
And curiosity and he spoke.

[Chelsea Arrington was born and raised in a town named after a poet, and so The Norns decreed she too was fated to become a poet.  Her work can be found in the magazines, Spectral Realms, The Audient Void, The Literary Hatchet, and elsewhere.  Chelsea is a practicing Witch in an active coven.  She hoards books and art and lives in Southern California with her Viking and their children.]