by Danielle Dulsky
Let’s leave this place, my sister-in-lawlessness.
The moon is near-new, and these small joys, these pitiful but wonderfully preposterous poppets I’ve handcrafted out of over-flaked candle wax and juniper branches are no longer making me laugh.
Those feeble attempts at yanking my anguished spirit from its doldrums have ceased to be an effective medicine, and nothing can save me now but a morning born hot and spit straight from the mouth of .an ascended, slow-creeping Persephone
These quiet-yawning blooms are waking wild, and so am I. It’s unfettered hilarity I’m looking for. It’s nature’s nog of serendipitous sunlight, ironic beauty, bad dancing, and boisterous birdsong.
Only the next whirl in this spiral dance of time will rescue me from an overcast Craft, and those newborn creatures with wide-eyes, squeaky voices, and hopeful hearts are stirring in my Maiden’s psyche now, bidding we spend a day wandering and giggling like the Underworld Goddess returned, howl-chanting unmelodious and poorly rhyming hymns to our waning humor and gathering up fallen, phallic branches for those Beltane fires that will surely reignite our passion.
Can you picture it? You can laugh; it’s funny.
We’ll prance about like the last unicorns riding the victorious wave ashore, holding those blessed branches against our foreheads and naming ourselves the mystic saviors of this small kingdom of ours.
Let’s remind our inner Persephones why the top-side world is the place to be on these warmer mornings.
We’ll climb a patch-worked sycamore and smoke some heady mugwort right there on the lowest branch, then we’ll share our more chuckle-worthy dreams before the noonday sun robs them from our memory.
Just last night, I dreamt I dug my erotic innocence out of the lost and found while a high-breasted faery with knowing eyes and wicked teeth poked at my ribs.
I told her a dirty joke then- the one about the Witch and the walrus- and she cackled so hard she exploded into a glitter-volcano of sweet-smelling and sparkling bubbles.
I tried to swallow as many of the free-floating things as I could, but they kept popping on my nose and bursting before I could claim any of the magick as my own.
Like a feckless fish hopping from the water to gulp a wiser, winged creature, I leapt about my dreamscape until all the bubbles were gone.
My vindictive cat was on my belly when I woke, purring succubus that she is, and her tail flicked at my face while her razor claws rhythmically pierced my skin.
It was a message to lighten up, I think.
This Witch is tired of taking herself so seriously, and that crooked grin on your face tells me you are, too.
Even the most haggard crows are calling us into the blooming wilds, begging us leave our tightly lidded incantations and silken robes at home, and I’m as thirsty as they are for the fertile greens of a Spring ripening toward fruition.
Don’t mistake my desire for debauchery as disrespect.
I have paid my dues in somber, neath-the-ground ceremonies this Winter, I assure you.
I’ve earned every ache I’ll have in my belly once you’re through sharing your most obscene stories, and I’d pay dearly right now for just one genuine, gut-deep guffaw that rocks my body as hard as a horned, hungry lover.
Just as this new moon rises and before those blooms of Beltane start showing off, let’s take to these lonesome woods of mine and remind those heathen trees what joyous, soft-bodied humans look like.
Let’s forget all we know about our wounded depths for just one day, and let’s be the naked, carefree Witches they wrote about.
Tell me how it is with your chortling glee, with that wild, under-skin spring running from your beauteous wobbling belly to your emerald-chalice of a heart.
Tell me where you stash your ecstatic, high-fire bliss, and I’ll teach you the language of the corvids.
Speak jubilance, my love, and Persephone will answer; she, too, grows weary of the sepia-toned world and yearns for the silliness of Spring, for the rose-crowned hedonism we all left behind last Autumn.
We’ll find her dripping in dirt and roaming about the budding forest trying to remember how to skip and retraining her stinging eyes to see the sun.
IN CONCLUSION
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