Viscum album (mistletoe)
From the druid vision it creeps through neural caverns back to the arc of ancestral voices
In the dark lodge of backbrain, the spine tree, which, from there the roots of the tongue,
Fire it forwards boiled by breath in the cauldron of the mouth.
It emerges complete, an ejected god-form brilliantly swathed, a gold-pinned cloak.
A body of light this beast has become, from wild to wise, from wrathful to illumined.
.
From whence do we grow?
Not from the left leaf, nor the right leaf, but from the point in between.
We grow from the dividing point, from neither and from nor,
Balanced and hefted the spear of green life thrusts deep into the dark secret of the world
And becomes born.
.
So thus, mould the dark to ferment the light.
The dark muscle fires the star blood.
The poison well, the poison cauldron,
That is the only place to distil wisdom.
As the youth ejaculates deep into the warm folded love of his girl,
As the tongue searches each grunt and scream for music and rhyme,
The light will not come forth because it has goodness.
It must have fuel to burn: some dark slick greasy remains,
The blubber and wrack of melted lives,
The dancing skeleton god breaking bones and sucking marrow.
.
He is not a druid who knows not this.
He is not a man of skill who does not refine the ore of remembering,
Who does not balance the two ways and find the third and only way
Through pain and despair to a steady roaring bright flame of light.
—
This is the third and last piece based on the image below, which is from a Celtic coin. The words were explorations to find meaning for the strange and powerful imagery. In this part, the resemblance of the motif coming out of the mouth to those that appear in other coin designs suggest it might be a form of mistletoe, or at least, the sacred tree of which mistletoe might be an archetype.
simonhlilly 