This seems particularly suitable for our Lady of Death.

Vermilion Flycatcher, San Pedro River, Arizona
~Margaret Atwood

The river’s been here, violent, right where we’re standing,
you can tell by the trash caught overhead in the trees.
Now it’s a trickle, and we’re up to our knees
in late-spring yellowing weeds. A vermilion
flycatcher darts down, flutters up, perches.
Stick a pin in your thumb, the bead of blood
would be his colour. He’s filled with joy
and the tranced rage of sex. How he conjures,
with his cry like a needle. A punctuation. A bone button

on fire. Everything bad you can imagine
is happening somewhere else, or happened
here, a hundred years or centuries
ago. He sings, and there’s the murder:
you see it, forming under
the shimmering air, a man with brown
or white skin lying reversed
in the vanished water, a spear
or bullet in his back. At the ford, where the deer
come at dusk to cross and drink
and be ambushed. The red bird

is sitting in the same tree, intensely
bright in the sun that gleams on cruelty, on broken
skullbone, arrow, spur. Vultures cluster,
he doesn’t care. He and his other-coloured mate
ignore everything but their own rapture.
Who knows what they remember?
Birds never dream, being their own.
Dreams, I mean. As for you, the river
that isn’t there is the same one
you could drown in, face down.

Vermilion Flycatcher (Image by Cornell University)

I haven’t been posting the daily draw for a while Because Reasons, but I just had to share this one.

Some days, you just have to laugh, because there’s nothing else you can do except keep on keeping on.

Fenrir/Devil; Gar (Odin); Jormundgand/World

This song has been in my head all day, even before I did the draw. It seems appropriate.

Cherishing What Isn’t

~ Jack Gilbert

Ah, you three women whom I have loved in this

long life, along with the few others.

And the four I may have loved, or stopped short

of loving. I wander through these woods

making songs of you. Some of regret, some

of longing, and a terrible one of death.

I carry the privacy of your bodies

and hearts in me. The shameful ardor

and the shameless intimacy, the secret kinds

of happiness and the walled-up childhoods.

I carol loudly of you among trees emptied

of winter and rejoice quietly in summer.

A score of women if you count love both large

and small, real ones that were brief

and those that lasted. Gentle love and some

almost like an animal with its prey.

What is left is what’s alive in me. The failing

of your beauty and its remaining.

You are like countries in which my love

took place. Like a bell in the trees

that makes your music in each wind that moves.

A music composed of what you have forgotten.

That will end with my ending.

Saturday Aubade
~ Anastasia Haysler

Watching you while  you slept,
Tired from the night,
Dreaming of the night,
I noticed that one lock of hair
Which persists in curling over your left eye
Despite your best efforts to straighten i.
I leaned over to kiss it,  and you.
You woke, and kissed me with the sweetness of the dream.

Then we both slept, contented.

They Tied the Loving Knot
~Anonymous, Ireland, 17th Century

They tied the loving knot: a crane
and the fox from Bri Ghobhann.
The fox vowed to the crane
their knot would never break.

Unwise, in a wilderness,
to cleave to such a mate . . . .
When he’s been fasting a while
put not your trust in William.

The crane soon fell asleep;
he caught her by the throat;
I won’t go on. In short,
he parted her head from her body.

Know it was she who did it—
and goodbye to my ladylove!
She the fox and I the crane,
and our loving much the same.