Hodmadod

Hodmadod

I.
"Murder of Crows"
Crackling softly in the dark,
The dying embers of the fire throw
Shifting shadows on the walls.
The wind sighs.

Peering dreamily
Out of the window through the soft drizzle,
I see the slowly bruising night sky:
Sparkling with the diamonds-in-velvet of light
Billions of years old.
Lightning flashes, distantly: jagged, phosphorous.
Like phosphenes,
The waxing, gibbous moon shines-
Blacklight in the cold.

II.
Further away, the black ink trees
Gently sway in a cool autumn breeze...
Evening fog snakes along the ground-
A parliament of owls awakens.

In Medieval times, just as today,
The shortened days and long frosty nights
Marked the end of the harvest.

III.
Then, as now, the lonely, hideously-shaped
King of the Fields
Presided with eerie silence on the far hill brow,
A silhouetted crucifix against the twilit sky
Watching.
Watching, perhaps biding his time-
Standing in drunken, stiffly contorted attention,
As befits one without a skeleton,
Through snow, rain, heat and cold-
Patient:
His only movements
The flapping of frayed cloth in the wind.

IV.
The Emperor of Emptiness,
Sadly surveying his stark, terrible
Empire of dying vegetation.
Still, he watches me;
Sagging arms outstretched,
As the mist envelopes his lower body,
Partially dismembered by a late autumn storm...

I recall that I once read
Of killers hiding within
Scarecrows during pursuit;
Of murderers secreting bodies,
Thieves stashing loot-
Of haunted scarecrows
Rising up during the festival of Samhain.

Strangers and passers-by
Attack them unprovoked:
Stabbing and mutilating
These soundless, solemn effigies.
Unsettled, no doubt,
By the proximity of the near-human.

V.
My skin grows prickly and I draw the curtain,
just as the Hodmadod is cloaked in fog.
I check the lock one last time before retiring-
Was that a sound on the other side of the door?

No...
Just the wind, I think.

In my mind's eye,
I see the King of the Field's face:
Cruelly frowning with his slash of a mouth;
Drippy, red painted eyes-
Watching me watching him...

VI.
The next morning,
Grey through the window, as the mist rolls away,
I can see that my doppelganger
Has wandered off again-
I open the door and the Jack-a-Lent tumbles in-

Limp,
his stuffing poking around stringy cloth hands and feet,
out of his shirt, and beneath his shrunken leather hat.
His frozen features frown angrily up from the floor-
Staring.
The way he holds himself...
Perhaps more than one expects from a man of rags,
Stuffing, sticks and duff.

"Just the storm again," I murmur, gently lifting him up
to return to his cruciform.
It's only a matter of time for the King of the Fields-
And his endless, eldritch reign...