Whom will meet me here,
where the black river ends,
spilling the final breath of dead men
upon the soils of a garden tended, kept,
in the dooryard of the sisters fate?

Whom will dream the blooms
of the roses, still in seed, where I sleep
safe inside the foxfire of a memory fading?
Will you warm me, then, with your sunlight grin,
your immersive breath like languid summer,
and sing me, from the ground, the invisible spells ––
rattle of creation –– the quiet songs that ensoul the body,
that raise the varied landscape
of all I am yet to be? 

And when I stand, all new and green,
just a boy of clover height, will you summon for me the stories,
winged and true, the tall-tales and myth in my blood,
as thick and sweet as rendered sap?
Will you carve, for me, a mask 
ancient, wild, adorned 
like the ruddy face of so many beasts,
that I may dance like they once did, when they walked upright,
with their drums and their sticks, calling on the wayward sun?
To mark myself peculiar, an unnerving threat to the deer that come at dawn, 
with their black-marble eyes, their musky hooves tramping,
tearing up shoots and sprigs from their beds
of compost and loam.

At last, you’ve come again. 
For, in the quietudes of night, I have become a red star,
fastened, by root, to the spiraling Earth. 
But, I found among my blooms, a thought, unusual as I:
can there be transcendence for a flower? Or am I to live and die
in the soils where I’ve been tended, kept? 
I heard such from the field mouse and hare:
some might yet feel the sun for only just a season,
less Brother Frost, pulled by the hounds of northern wind, 
come swift and early.
Oh, gardener, may I know of this world, its violence,
its dreaming, with my eyes or my feet? Might I cry out to the clouds,
indifferent to my plight, but never gather counsel 
from the river?

Go then, cleave me from my stem,
there is liberation in the pain of knowing freedom.
Carry me to the swaying fields, the decaying forests,
to weave my leaves through the music of the living world,
and then on, through the doorways of the numinous.
And wherever I go shall be a garden, 
anarchic and wild, and that shall be my life, my love,
my feral ministry. 

Let me wilt upon the bough of the rowan tree,
or on the banks of the River Seine,
and embrace the earth with my heart, my breath,
as the sunlight fades, in beauty. 
May I mourn the world, my little life, 
but not in chains, in beauty.

[Silvatiicus Riddle is a Rhysling-Nominated Dark Fantasy & Speculative Fiction Writer and Poet. He hails from the city of Gotham, where he hosts a glaring of chthonic gods disguised as cats, a hoard of books, and all of his imaginary friends. He studied English and Literature at Kingsborough. His poetry has appeared in Abyss & Apex, Dreams & Nightmares, Enchanted Living, Eternal Haunted Summer, and Spectral Realms. His fiction has appeared in Weird Fiction Quarterly, with a story forthcoming in Apex Magazine’s “Strange Locations” anthology. You may find his work at: http://linktr.ee/silvatiicusriddle]