Beltane

Out of sight, out of my mind as the end of April brings up images of lions and lambs, trying to remember how the month began.  Magnolia, crab-apple, cherry trees are flushed with white, pink, and purple blossoms on their naked gray branches.  They reach their dendrites shamelessly to the sun in the azure sky as islands of white and black drift by overhead.  You can see and hear outlines of Persephone and the Dark Lord in their embrace from the gusts of wind surrounding those dark islands the same way the mariner can hear the breakers on the reef.  These zephyrs, dust devils, and jinn are outlined in petals of passion’s colors, soft on the cheek, riveting to the eye.  What will the Mayday bring?  Dances about the pole? Workers uniting? Laws being respected?  Or will those that have been waiting, sharpening their knives into a deadly gleam, burst forth to ravine across the blood red seas of war?

It is the month in which the carrion crow black against green, feathers akimbo, tussle in the grass together before they are seen bearing sticks for their nests in the trees.  It is the time when the syringa leaf out, but before the cones of lilac, amethyst, and white carry the hedges in to June and the heat of summer makes one lethargic.  The winter wheat has begun to sway in the breeze.  What snow that remains is almost lost in the purple haze gathering in the hills.  Treasure calls in the gullies, washes, and ravines.  A gentle nudge and the crystals are reveled.

So as the blue moon wains and the bull’s nostrils wander over his pastured herd, the gyre of ribbons dances away the last days of frost, attracting the numen to the coming new moon.  The chill that has allowed the walls of marble to be filled with laborer’s silver and be guarded by the lawyer’s laws may be dissolved in sour wine of our passions.  Perhaps in the lattice of the patterns of those streamers, weaved in the hands of the young we may divine the overseers who tempt those with gleaming knives with shiny silver, gold, and jewels.  We may bind the paymasters so that the labors-of-blood yield nothing but the sterile result of an empty belly.

 

 

The Last Boy Scout

 

That’s the title of an old Bruce Willis movie.  I’ve probably sat through it twice.  Not sure if I will ever go back.

I failed as a Boy Scout, but some of the knowledge still is in me.  It was a whole embarrassing rebellion of an immature mind thing, and I am not sure if I have matured all that much. The imprinting rises some days, the oaths.

“I will do my best to do my duty to God and Country.”

I am not sure if that is accurate, and I’m not going to go back to find a copy of the Scout Manual.  I don’t have one on the shelf.

Every time I see a person disrespect the flag by giving it a big hug it raises alarms.  Especially when they have a shit-eating grin on their face, like they have pinched the bottom of a waitress.  I’ve more respect for a crowd burning the flag on the street.  At least that is in the manifesto of retiring a flag when it’s done its duty: Fire.  Trust me, I really learned to love the flag coming back from in country.  Remember, I failed as a Boy Scout.

I also took that damned oath of “to protect and defend from all enemies foreign and domestic” when I picked up my official passport.  That ghost has come back to haunt of late, or should I say that old dog has come back to rest by the fire.  It snarls in its dreams and twitches its legs as it hunts.

I am about to retire.  I expect my government to remember the New Deal, the one where I worked for it.  I picked up their garbage; I helped educate their children.  I want to be that old dog by the fire, however the old enemies, foreign and domestic, are still there: the evil things people do.  Since there will be no more work-week, it may be time to whimper and whine by the door to get out, poke my nose into the smell, to hunt.

It is hard to recall the other oaths that I have taken, there have been some.  I suppose they will come back to roost in their own good time.  Oaths, admonitions, guidelines from the loa, the diableros, the fragments of the Golden Dawn, and always to try at least to do no harm.