Poem

1.
My weald of tales, my beech leaves, my bronze.
A world of trees shades the land's shadow.
Under the tribe's winter, roots of iron,

Roots of grain; and at the thicket's heart
A man's tread, a bird-cry, the glitter
Of a pool rippled with a stone blade,

His last gift. My green eye shuts. Slowly
Drops of light in the night sky falter
My gifts for him: The Hunter, The Plough.

2.
Through the trees, through the ferns, through the
dark: A blade shrived with the eyes of a beast
And its five wounds. Armour chafes the spell

Of the wood, my runes, my tree-letters
Mumble in stones. Deeper the heart folds
Leaves about the rood's axe-shaft, a grove

Where the scaled Worm, the Ravager, lurks.
...