Morrigan Poem by Giles Watson

1. Morrigan

There's a way of ripping Roman flesh
that only ravens can do. You take
a whole field-full, slaughtered
as a legion, and begin to fillet
the flesh, tweezering it between
blackened bills. You gobble down
the cosmopolitan influence, disdaining
to choke on the fishbone-snags of
politics. Politics isn't worth
a raven's feather out here, where
whole carcasses can be flensed
by wind alone. Brawn goes down

the craw so easily, greased by the
subcutaneous lard of civilized men.

2. The Garden of the Badb

Men's eyes hang on stalks of stubble,
swinging from their optic nerves,
pendulous as foxgloves. There are
blood spots and other interpunctions
bold as orchids. Heads, cleaved in
by horses' hooves, mould outwards
like mushrooms. You can pick out
the rare flowers of ring-fingers
severed by swords, and spattered
gall-bladders like bitter herbs.

Men do these things spontaneously:
sow them once, and they excel
at self-seeding. I can croak, preen,
swoop heedless through my blooming

garden.

3. Macha

I've got a steady grip on the bole of the beech tree:
you've not seen woman's muscles until you've seen mine.
One shake, and the mast starts falling, a bountiful crop
of men's heads. Don't cross me at a red moon: my face
will sprout black feathers, my eyes harden into ebony
beads, and out of my arms the quills will thrust,
ready to batter whole armies into submission. You can't
buy time from Macha: it has croaked out. Be afraid.

There is a groaning in the roots: whole generations
of luckless infantry, waiting to troop, by xylem
and phloem, up the trunk towards fruition, sucked
towards the branches, coalescing into kernels, turning
nut-hard, ready for cracking. There's a squall
of raven calls above the husks and splintered skulls.

4. Nemain

If you saw me in my frenzy, my black hair
streaming behind me like a flock of rooks,
you would ram your own spear through your
entrails, rather than face me. I can turn
friends fierce against each other: the merest
misunderstanding will set them filleting
and garotting, until the whole field
is a harvest of the twitching dead, furrows
channelling a full-on irrigation of steaming
blood. The soil is fruitful these days:
there has been such a ploughing-in of men,
and crops grow out of livers and of brains.

One man to rot, one man to grow, one
for the mouse, and the rest - for the crow.