Pagan Culture - Literature
Ill Met By Moonlight
Ill Met By Moonlight
by Sarah A. Hoyt
Ace Books
Young Will Shakespeare has a problem. The poor schoolmaster, barely out of his teens, comes home to find his young bride Nan gone and his baby daughter replaced in her crib by a wooden “stock.”
The Karma of Wasps
©2012 Cynthia Rudzis
The Karma of Wasps
by Patricia Snodgrass, artwork by Cynthia Rudzis
It was early April when Beverly Martin noticed the polistes wasp queen building her nest high in the pitch of the front porch roof. It was just a small daub of paper carefully smeared along the rafters, but Beverly knew that soon the young queen would lay her first clutch of eggs in the cells she was busy constructing.
Don, Beverly’s husband, was uneasy about allowing a wasp to build her nest there, but Beverly reassured him. “This species isn’t very aggressive,” she told him. “And she’s high up enough in the rafters as not to be a bother. Polistas are quite beneficial, especially when it comes to your garden. They’ll take care of the cabbage loopers and corn bores that you complain about. Besides, if you tear it down, she’ll just rebuild it, and then she really will be irate.”
“They won’t bother your bees?” He asked, frowning up at the queen.
“No, they’re not like yellow jackets and won’t invade the apiary.”
“All right,” he conceded, “but the first time I’m stung, she and her kin are outta here.”
“Fair enough,” Beverly responded as she noted the queen’s progress in her logbook. “If they become a nuisance, we can put up fly strips around the hive. It’s best to do it after sundown when they’re dormant. That way we can get rid of them without starting a war.”
The Green River Enchantment
The river weaves through
Layers of sandstone
As the ancient bone casts its spell,
Enthralling me
Under the heat of the desert sun.
Lady of Arizona
I’ve heard of your forest goddess,
a watery wood nymph with mossy hair,
watching large beasts with Her dark green eyes —
but She is not mine.
I worship the lines in between things
I worship the lines in between things,
The pulsing web that binds me,
that ties me into life.
Like one of those rope platforms
you used to see on wooden jungle gyms
in small parks surrounded by trees, it holds me up.
I worship, perhaps,
the Spider
who didn’t so make the web,
as keeps it whole,
patching it where it tears
or detaches from its wood-and-metal frame.
I worship
the infinite
knot.
Kelsey Andrews
» Originally appeared in newWitch #01
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Howling at the Gibbous Moon
Howling at the Gibbous Moon
- new snow
- crystals across
- the paloose hills
- pine and spruce
- blacken the
- canyons
- point me back
- to infinity
— Sheryl L. Nelms
» Originally appeared in newWitch #14
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