Saturday morning: we started down the lane toward the Farmer’s Market…..

On the quiet road

beauty lay

red fur ripple in

autumn breeze.

Still….

as morning, and cold.

Youth taken,

like my breath.

She was not as large as the Sionnach sacrificed by human machine to the north at Imbolg. No, the small Mabon tide offering had just begun her rounds as an adult. Tears of hurt and rage poured. Had the humans who took her life so little respect that they left her body in the road? So little honour, so little regard. We collected her with tenderness, seen by none – save the fluffy grey cat and piercing Raven eyes. She will rest near her Kin in the Ring. Bookends of Death this year… from the North on Imbolg lay the large Madadh Rua….and now, from the south on this new moon of Mabon tide, his small cousin…. Within several hundred yards of my Witches Cottage – Fox spilt his LIFE blood this year.

The Ring is renamed. No longer is that embankment of earth Liosnabroc….No. Death and blood have called it:

Liosnasionnach

the fort of the Fox

The Fox–Wife’s Invitation

by Jeannine Hall Gailey

These ears aren’t to be trusted.

The keening in the night, didn’t you hear?

Once I believed all the stories didn’t have endings,

but I realized the endings were invented, like zero,

had yet to be imagined.

The months come around again,

and we are in the same place;

full moons, cherries in bloom,

the same deer, the same frogs,

the same helpless scratching at the dirt.

You leave poems I can’t read

behind on the sheets,

I try to teach you songs made of twigs and frost.

You may be imprisoned in an underwater palace;

I’ll come riding to the rescue in disguise.

Leave the magic tricks to me and to the teakettle.

I’ve inhaled the spells of willow trees,

spat them out as blankets of white crane feathers.

Sleep easy, from behind the closet door

I’ll invent our fortunes, spin them from my own skin.