The Woodsman

The Woodsman - a reading (on YouTube)

Nothing I say matters,

This is not my red-cowled curse.

Yours is not my pain but it resonates

Like the first blow against a family tree.

In their eyes, I am sworn to support you,

Not fight for you, with you or against you,

Stand clear-eyed as their phantasms descend

In what should be the twilight of your gods.

Say nothing as they whisper in your ear,

Reweaving the illusions that consume you,

Reinforcing their familiar bonds,

Their slipknots tight and sacrosanct.

Attend like a dutiful daughter,

As they would have you do,

Forgetting I am neither female nor blood kin

Whose bedroom privileges apparently overlap on mine.

Bind your hands without comment

As you rework a childhood puzzle,

Your fingers bloody from the shards,

Black from unwinding the lead came,

As you reconstruct the mirror,

Piece by shattered piece,

Into a stained glass window

Reflecting your perfectly broken past.

Ignore the looking glass on your nightstand,

Casting light at fractured angles,

Revealing the shattered image of a woman

From the girl I never knew

Whose eyes implore me not to cast the counterspell,

As if my silence is not complicity,

As if glass daggers have not sliced my hands,

As if my fingertips are calloused yellow from craft

Like yours.

You play the fairy tale princess,

I watch you fall asleep,

To reawaken decades later

With a slap rather than a kiss.

I’m no charming wolf-prince like your brother,

No shining housecarl as you wish,

I inherited no magic sword,

Only this ax and an ordinary grindstone.

I command no armies, no allies,

Raise no tartaned clan,

Just wield this iron wedge,

Cleaving right from wrong.

I am the woodsman,

Rough-hewn and splintered timber

Fit only for the charcoaler,

Or to lay a charnel fire.

© 2015 Edward P. Morgan III