‘and she appears on the longest night to drive away the darkness and ensure the return of the light’ ~ folktale

Modern men sucked their teeth

said

don’t talk of myth

(fools)

only the stuccoed gum of our streets holds true –

tell us about that.

But we’d been waiting so long

we forgot and here she was

choosing this moment to invent herself

just as winter stripped back

to mauve and charcoal.

The smudging of heavy fog.

This is not a myth. The world was splitting like antlers

each tine a pathway to collapse

seeming to hold nothing inside but the threat

of nothing.

Then she

with those bottle-brown orbs for eyes

white fur of underbelly

roughed up the land with her hooves

shoving at snow

stamping out steam clouds

knowing the malevolence of the old ways —

strewn with empires of rock and fire

the names of all of the children.

(And the men asked yeah but who is the saviour who is the saved).

This is not a myth.

We’d been waiting so long

not for belief

but for something we’d lost in the woods.

Not some cheap symbol of hope

but the hard bone of duty

sheathed in a softness of care.

And though the star she held in her antlers was dwindling

the light was enough to bait the trail to the clearing

where we swam in the pool of it

pulling furs round our shoulders

prickling as they fused with our skin and antlers sprouted

like cradles for the suns we carried in velvet and (as we said)

this is not a myth —

we flicked the gum from our hooves

began the work of remaking the world.