Honey and Clover

She achieves at seventeen

What I still cannot at thirty

And I was slow to discover

The very lack of genius in my stars

It was high school before I saw the gap between

Two blades of grass, and realized suddenly

One grows so much faster than the other

We simply weren’t made equal

Now, spring finds me crying over

Another cup of honey and clover

~

Elizabeth Cook, 2015

Image from

Poem based on the show

The Night Hag’s Poem

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Spin and shatter and sweep the clay

With changing clouds and winding days

No work of human hand withstands

Time’s oft-short allotted span

So clay unto earth, earth unto dust

Towers to crumble and ploughs to rust

‘Till wilds run where they once did creep

Through wood and marsh, and scarlet deeps

With changing clouds and winding nights

Raze their fields and drown their lights

Grind clay unto earth, earth unto dust

Towers to fall and swords to rust

Follow, and hasten the workings of time

Hear the fellhorns and heed the signs

Waste the walls of their dead knight

And run them down with claw and blight

No work of human hand withstands

Time’s oft-short allotted span

But know you he who defies time?

Follow, follow, the Wizard of Nine.

~

Elizabeth Cook, 2015

When I could climb in through your window

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When I could climb in through your window

Your bed was a twin with scratched posts

From which we’d tent blankets, to huddle

Over old beads of your mother’s, and stamps

That we cut from used envelopes

When I could climb in through your window

It was a small night-light square in the dark

And I would tumble inside, giggling

Only to creep back to the sill to wait

For fireflies in the goldenrod below

We would play at swallowing those wandering lights

And whisper forgotten things through the night

And parting was fleeting, never worth a thought

Seems like there were more wildflowers

Back when I could climb through your window

 

~

Elizabeth Cook, 2015

High School Boys are PC

Da na na, na na na, Neeeeooooo.

Kou lays out his pencil crayons with precision, the laws of the colour wheel observed (beginning with indigo, as is his preference), before laying out the other contents of his pencil case. It is a new semester and the first day of cultural class in 1-01. He brushes nigh-invisible specks of dust from his new sketchbook.

Yves, Hiroki, and Rob look on with eyebrows climbing up their foreheads. And Yves, realizing that for once he has the chance to make a jab, tries to make one that the other two might appreciate.

Yves: “Kou,” faint laugh, “Kou, what the heck? You’re acting like some girl.”

Rob sniggers – Yves waits for the rejoinder. But Kou just frowns. He doesn’t even look at Yves, he stares at his sketchbook and frowns mightily. He selects a pencil. Then he doesn’t speak to any of them for the rest of the day. He stays bent over his sketchbook, even through science in last period, and heads out on his own as soon as the bell goes.

The next day Kou comes to school wearing a purple shirt.

Yves feels a wriggle of discomfort. Kou in purple is unprecedented. Yves’ comment of yesterday simmers and bubbles. Then Kou pauses in his work and takes out a tupperware, which has a pink lid, and he begins eating vegetables out of it.

They huddle up two desks over from Kou, all whispers.

Yves: “Doesn’t Kou seem a bit off? Maybe, since yesterday…”

Rob: “Yeah, like since you said that stuff.”

Yves: under his breath, “You thought it was funny!”

Rob: “Well you said it.”

Terrence: “What’d he say?”

Rob tells Terrence and Eshwar.

Eshwar: snort, “And then it came true!”

Terrence: “Well, if what you said hit a sore spot…” and his mouth broadens into a smirk, “it’s probably your fault, right?”

Yves: “My fault?”
Rob and Eshwar see what Terrence is about and chime in on the same note. Hiroki sees what Terrence is about, but chooses to remain bemused.

Rob: “You can’t just say that stuff to people.”

Eshwar: “Way to be intolerant, Yves.”

Terrence: “It obviously bothered Kou, and you should apologize. He shouldn’t have to deal with judgement like that.”

They have Yves cowed faster than you can say social justice warriors. Hesitant, he goes and hovers near Kou’s desk. When he glances back, Rob and Terrence and Eshwar are making chivvying motions, and of course it’s when he turns back to Kou that they revert to shit-eating grins.

Yves: “Kou…” Kou doesn’t look up. “Kou, you know about yesterday… I’m sorry I said that, I mean, just because your pencil crayons were in rainbow order and you had things so prissy – I mean, particular. It’s not like that makes you a girl – unless you want to be, of course! And that would be fine! Totally cool!”

Closer to the front of the classroom, Lana’s head snaps up as she hears this.

Kou makes an annoyed grunt. He stops drawing, leans back in his chair, and finally looks up at Yves. “Did you say something yesterday? I didn’t notice.”

Yves: “Yeah – wait, what?”

Kou picks up his pencil crayon again. Before Yves can process this, Lana comes in like a freight train, levelling a finger. “Hey! He’s not girly for being organized! You can’t be a decent human being in the first place if you’re not organized!”

Rob snorts and throws his eraser (which he has not been using anyway) at her.

Slow-mo. Lana’s eye darts, locks onto the eraser. She catches it, a one-handed ninja blur, a declaration of war. She and Rob glare at each other like stray cats.

Into the mounting tension Kou finishes a stroke of colour, and there is a click of finality as he puts his last colour back on the desk. It and all the other pencil crayons are laid perfectly parallel to the edge of his paper. He declares that he has finished his pachycephalosaurus.

His non sequitur fizzles out the lightning bolts that Lana and Rob’s eyes are hurling, de-escalating the war. Lana carelessly tosses the eraser in the vicinity of Rob’s desk and goes to look at Kou’s drawing.

The next day Kou is wearing his conventional blue shirt. When Hiroki asks him about the purple shirt, and the pink Tupperware, and the vegetables, Kou sweeps his expectant audience with a sneer.

Kou: “That was indigo, you morons. And I don’t pack my own lunch.”

A flip through Kou’s sketchbook would reveal coloured drawings of considerable taste and technical execution. It’s not like he only reads in his spare time…

Afterdays – 4

Continued from Afterdays -3

But far as Don ranged, and doubled back, and took to the water, and came around again, eventually he gained…

For Willa had stopped moving. Many, many seasons had passed without Don’s heeding them. The girl who was no longer a girl had never seen any sign of pursuit, and might have settled sooner, had she been able to find a suitable place which deemed a female of her temperament suitable, however reluctantly.

Yet at length, Willa settled. The spear had been lost somewhere between the last mountain range and the lake of the bearded fish, and Willa had been aged not only by time but by her travels, so that when Don stalked into the seaside village she had borne a child or two, and thickened, and had gotten her hands thoroughly roughened to the peculiar ways of ocean fishing. She no longer looked deer-tail white from a distance. Don might not have known her at first glance were it not for the narrowing of her eyes and the throbbing of his crooked nose.

They stared at one another for a moment, and the village got very quiet. Willa broke and ran.

For his part, Don was sorely disappointed by the changes wrought upon Willa. But this resolved a dilemma which had returned time and again during his marching. He had been of two minds about what to do with her, and what to do in what order, and despite losing the long-anticipated moment of decision, Don had to admit that things were being wrapped up very tidily.

So the hunter went after the woman, scrambling up the sea cliffs, which were thickly sown with jungle all the way to their very edges, dark branches stretching outward over the water. Twilight played the trick of their shadows doing more fleeing and more chasing than their legs, and turned the gulls’ nests ruddy. The birds rose in a deafening swarm as Willa and Don climbed past, Willa still with some measure of her lead, and the gusts from their wings threatened almost to fling her from the rocky face.

It was not quite fair to reproach Willa for running along the jungle’s edge when she reached the top of the cliff, but he did not anyway. She would have done better to stay on the cliff or to go straight into the jungle, thought Don derisively, who came up and over the cliff, already running. There was so little brush in his path that he could run nearly at full tilt.

This poor judgement illustrated that Willa had somehow survived despite knowing nothing. Don herded her onto a promontory with ease and stood there admiring the neatness of the box he’d made. Twisting trunks and vines hanging thicker than his leg towered behind him, a titanic darkness lurking, while to the west, in one hemisphere over the cliffs and the water, twilight was turning to sunset in sweeping flares of defiance. The changing of sun for moon burned the skies in colours never seen in the days when there had been skyscrapers, and lit the sea from molten gold at one curving rim to silver-flecked ebony at the other.

“You asshole, if I was a man – ”

Don didn’t see any point in answering that when he was busy thinking, and running one hand over the spearblades on his back as he decided which one to use.

“Christ! What’s a hunter like you, when you got nothing better to do than to follow me?”

Loud and bitter, but only to her own ears, and Willa could tell that he wasn’t listening, and she was all the angrier because this made it harder for her not to shake and cry.

Don considered, and no longer saw a deer in her at all. That was when he decided against the spears entirely and jumped in, into a tangle of flailing arms and shrieks and a bit of shouting, which was probably his own. As a last resort, Willa’s teeth snapped – and they almost caught, so Don grunted and knocked her right on the chin.

Willa reeled back, forgetting to flail. There were only a few feet between them, their shadows stretching long so that they might have been born of a people who were taller than the herons and the wolves, a giant race which might have moved the world rather than moved with it. She looked at him for a moment, and they both knew when the sense of being irrevocably trapped sank in, when her mouth went dry and her lips curled back.

Don took a step forward, enjoying the crunch of the rocks under his feet. Her snarl was nothing to bother him, but unreasonably she still made the expression. Willa took a step back.

He took another step, he reached. And then Willa upturned his notion of how things would go, for she darted straight backward into thin air, without an animal’s sense which would have told her that nothing was there.

Her snarl vanished and the pure horror that replaced it was, offensively, not a thing that was concerned with Don at all. Her horror was all for herself. Then she vanished.

Don sat on the cliff between jungle and sea disconsolately, honing his spears, for some time. Even the memory of the dying puma – the thrust of his spear fist-deep into its eye, reducing the yellow flicker of hatred into a socket – was of no use to him. And until the sounds of wide, leathery wings crept into the darkening sky, he, whose head would not reach the shoulder of one of the gargantuan horses, sat there like some pensive lord of the forest.

There must be something else, in a place so vast as this great earth, which would offer another chase like that one.