Two Times Haunted

by Brett Rutherford

freely adapted from an Anglo-Saxon poem, “Scael se gaest cuman”

Two times, and two times only,
the soul returns to the body.

Your ghost shall come,
groaning and grievous,
when seven nights have passed.

If your mischance it is
to be the unburied dead,
it shall sit upon your breast

as though at feast
with raven, hawk and vulture.

It shall not deter them, tears
not of water made, cries
not of mortal mouth sounded,
hand ineffectual to beat
the carrion carnival away.

Or if you be in earth, fresh loam
upon the well-wept grave,
round it shall walk three times,
and on the slightest wind
its keening is imperceptible
to all but the smiling worms
as they begin the long business.

Add to your death night
three hundred years.

From where and when the souls
go about their grim reckoning,
it shall come to you again,
searching you out among ruins
and toppled stones, burned-out
buildings and places whose names
have become unpronounceable.

Still, none but witch or wizard

would be the wiser of its coming.

Frail and shrill, a dusty cobweb
of what you once were,

trailing its brittle fingers
amid the dust of the boneyard,
marking your skull among a heap
of your contemporaries, cast
into an ossuary pit, or
down to dust among forgotten urns.

Then shall its sad voice accuse you:
“Gory dust! why did you torture me
with the foulness of earth,
the agonized rot to clay returning?

“In all your idle days, did you think
to lay up a treasure for me? You lived,
you slept, you made love obliviously,
you lied and grew rich, averted your eye
from art or music or human charity.

“Why have I nothing to lay
at the feet of the cosmos
that has your name upon it?
Why for three hundred years
did you torture me,
you, the mere food of worms!”

The Ravens Are Waiting, The Crows Have Arrived

by Brett Rutherford

1

Ravens are waiting. The crows have arrived.
Brown oaks darken with their spread wings, fanned tails.
Shrill calls from inside the chapel belfry
echo from the building fronts — a census
might count a thousand; how many make up
one "murder" is anyone's guess, but this,
at edge of college campus, counts as
a university already robed,
their corvine dissertations defended,
their gaudeamus anthems sunset-sung
as they spatter the bus-shelter's rooftops
and huddle all night in their unseen nests,
where they are nurturing tomorrow's crows
for their ancient calling. Ravens are waiting,
edged out, biding their time in ones and twos,
but they, too, are about their business,
hatching as many eggs as possible,
for they, afloat the white tide of Europe
onto this new continent, remember.

2

     Adapted from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 937 CE

Here at Brunanburh, hosts
killed by King Athelstan,
lord of long-armed earls,
boon-giver of bracelets
to kneeling nobles,
killed he countless ones,
and with his brother also
Edmund, Elder, the aetheling —
how many killed? Too many
to count! Down the dead fell
as they destroyed the dread Scots
and burned their fair-sailed ships.
Loud the field resounded, bright
as gold the sweat on their armor!

Glad the sun rose, giving
light, the great star's morning
merry over the field of blood.
Dead soldiers lay, with lance
and dart struck down,
Norsemen prostrate
their brazen shields behind,
from arrows overshot.
Or Viking, or Scot,
or trait'rous Briton ally,
died they all dead
beneath the same bright sky!

Though some escaped,
Norsemen fleet in their nailed ships,
dragged off with our darts
inside them, sailed off
on the stormy sea
to fight a better day —
let them flee to Dublin,
sad city in Viking thrall!

But bellowing berserkers
they left behind.
Let them enjoy the crows,
and keening for their kind,
the dismal, starving kite
to entrail feast invite,
and let their last sight
be the black raven
with his horned beak
descending wide-winged.
And they, of armor stripped,
invite the white worm,
the voiceless toad,
the maggot-bearing fly.
By mid-day sun, the blood-
feast will draw the eagle,
and the greedy after-feast
of the falcon, battle-hawk.
At dusk, the gray beast comes.
Let but one live lamenting
the jaws of the wood-wolf.

Never in all the world's war
had there been a greater
slaughter, nor more destroyed
by the sharpened sword!

3

These are not bombs or arrows, yet.
Those who walk vertical are not yet
horizontal and motionless.
Not javelins, but hurled epithets,
anonymous death threats
are their weapons of choice.

Passive, unvaccinated idiots,
four to a pram, wheel to the park,
pushed by unlettered parents
whose only book celebrates
eyes plucked for eyes unopened.

The earth beneath them weeps,
the methane-pocketed soil shrugs,
Swiss-cheese sink-holed hollowed:
whose house will it swallow next?

The water, oil-slicked, rills bright
in rainbow glitterings, but no one
minds. The bees, too weak to pollinate
the trees, can only buzz protest.
The shrinking bird host
has no elected legislators.

The armies are everywhere.
More bullets in stock than ever
babies can be made. One with
your name on it awaits you!
Just one emergency more,
and troops tip-toe
across this border, that
river declared as mine
and not yours, the oil there
for the taking, loot's prime
directive! A subtle lead-up,
dueling conspiracies of complicit
foreigners, expert at poisoning
from village well to townhouse
door-knob, gas-death for all,
warehouses are ready, germs known
and unknown pocketed
for easy distribution. War-mongers
worse than war-hawks, with
mercenary wink, a profit
pocketed, the rich secured
in their walled manors —
oh, they are almost ready!

Led by a drooling madman,
and weasel sniveling, a nation rots.
No need for foreign enemies
when enemies of the people
are among us already. Take arms!
The National Guard will help.
Your local police are militarized
and know who the secret Muslims are!

Park and field, tent city
and commandeered stadium,
vast open spaces sky-spread
await the arrival of carrion.
The ground will groan
with the bodies of the dead.
Serves them right: journalists
the scum of Karl Marx, the host
of homeless what business theirs
to clog our cities, those bearded
zealots with their hairy Protocols,
off with you, o everything but white!

Athelstan's heirs, they cannot wait
for this. They were born to see
this thing through at last.
Sheets off, gentlemen, it's
Armageddon among us.

Ravens are waiting.
The crows have arrived.