Muse Poem by Sheena Blackhall

The pool quivers and darkens.
It has become moonless, midnight black
The tilted sickle drowns, unhinged, upended
The stars are orphaned waifs
Normality's suspended

Now is the reign of the heron's stilted stillness
The corpses'clammy silence
Uncannily, unaccountably,
Unsought, unbought, untaught
A stallion springs from the pot's dead centre
On hooves of spray and ice-

Marvellous, eldritch, a gleaming jetty jewel
He snorts and stamps, my lovely liquid tempter
On the banksof a poem's shivering, yawning pool

His flanks are ripples of power, thus muse of mine
My water-horse, my mentor
He waits for me to mount his back and soar

When we are joined and one
Joined and one and dancing
Into the depths of the dizzily dazzling linn
We outpour streams of words
Like flights of snow-white swans
As we plunge into creation
Into the ebony dream realm
Under the slippery salmon's silver fin

This dark lord is my shadow
I do not fear him
He gives tongue to the dumb, dead days
Pray let me always hear him.