Green Man
Face spinning
Like a Top come Spring
Old & Young & Old again
With gaze of Leaves
Grin of Branches
Merry in May’s bounty
As birds crown Him
In warbling Diadem.
From Ash & Oak,
Maple & Aspen
He peers in laughing Wonder
As buds explode from
Winter’s torpor.
Pines, who kept
His green fire alight
Through all Darkness
& cold, expand to Stand
Majestic in bristling Rows,
Dollops of sweet sap
Running from woodpecker
Wounds, beards of Needles
On boughs jovial with
His ubiquitous Countenance:
Ancient & New,
Old & Young,
Wild like a child’s Top
Spinning.

[Scott J. Couturier is a Rhysling-nominated poet and prose writer of the weird, liminal, and darkly fantastic. His work appears in numerous venues, including The Audient Void, Spectral Realms, Eternal Haunted Summer, Space and Time Magazine, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and Weirdbook, while his most recent release is a collection of weird & cosmic horror verse titled Nightmuse: Poems of Speculative Darkness, available from Jackanapes Press. He works as a copy and content editor for Mission Point Press, also co-editing the anthology series Weird Fiction Quarterly. Currently he lives obscure reverie in the wilds of northern Michigan with his partner/live-in editor and two cats.]