The Charmer by Evenlight

A soldier hurrying to his King

Had his horse fall lame

And seeking help he was told

The charmer might give him aid

So he went into a dell of ferns

Where lay the charmer’s house

Knocked, and there he waited

Until an aged woman came out

He touched his badge in salute

And offered generous pay

But she said she could do nothing

And began to turn away

“You cannot, or will not?”

The soldier did then demand

“My King can surely pay your price”

Yet the woman shook her head

Underside man

He ate my nightmare and I woke

To his reaching for my last years

In raging torrents and parched channels

Roots and roofs mired in tears

I would have lived the dreaming through

With all its miseries

Rather than see his hands dispersing

Earth into hollow galaxies

And I had given him nothing

I had not crowned him underside

An arbiter of fates with appetite

To eat fruits of mouth and mind

But he had his crown of the people

All neighbours but strangers to me

And I was helpless but to yield him

My future wrapped in my dreams

*

Image from earth.com

Going

Lift the heavens’ paper screens

When I turn my head

And let the bands of day presage

Roads running blue to red

Solar-powered raft

What love did I have that

Could ride hawk’s red

To the underside of the dawn?

I sat sipping the dregs

Of the radio connection

Dying in my palm

Some part I must have said aloud

Sky curling in and earth drying out

And I overseeing nothing

On an overturned cracked bucket

Where the road crumbled

And birds forgot to sing

Faerie lost

I saw your footprints in the moss

Then, but now no longer

Trailing in the brook, ‘cross sunning rock

Then, but now no longer

What canopy could smell as fine

As night clouds through the trees

What bed the moss’ rival

What halls like trackless leaves

We touched hands once below the cliff

That turned the merlin’s head

And I followed you into gullies

Where time rode water’s wend

I saw you perched upon the moss

Then, but now no longer

And loved your naked, dirtied soles

Then, but now no longer