The Owl’s Anthem: Songs for the Dead under the Quickening Moon
from ‘Ways of the Witch Storyteller’ by Danielle Dulsky
The full moon found me wild-eyed with wickedness on my tongue, and I perched my spritely-with-spring bones deep in the hollow of a graveyard oak. She loomed large and loving, that thick-trunked beast, casting a long-armed shadow across the moss-masked stones bearing the names of my dead. Such myth was there in that haunted place. Such a timely purpose did I find nested in her low-humming belly, and I began to sing the saddest nursery rhymes I could remember.
I was half owl, I think. I was pale-feathered. I was a creature of evening and a most patient poet whose human words had yet to match the moment. My wet lips pressed into bark, and I crooned that old haunted song about a cradle in the tree-tops, broken boughs, and the soon-to-fall babe. My muse was memory, my medium the quickening, and my shape a cunning raptor.
Communing with those ghosts who knew me best, who recognized my wider eyes and more mournful voice, liquid poetry poured from my heart. I bled song. I hummed with stories my human tongue could never tell. The moonlight met my owl’s nature, and I became a living ceremony. I sung the still-roaming souls of the dead home, and I let them mark me with their most potent times.
They showed me much, those ghosts. They showed me their small love stories, their gardens, and afternoons spent swimming in the stolen river I still know. They showed me joy and innocence charred in the furnace of war. They showed me their hands weaving and brewing and building then rotting to bone below these stones where those sparking seeds are fed by their flesh even now, even as the soil becomes saltier and their epitaphs lose their once-poignant meanings.
I sang it all. Every mundane moment they showed me became an epic verse. My owl tongue moved with the medicine of eulogy, and the whole of this hallowed ground rested in harmony and grace while the faces of the dead brightened with that elusive wholeness-of-spirit. The oak met my song, and I felt her roots stretching through countless coffins, wrapped around concrete, urn, locket, rock, and rib, her veins a conduit for memories made by the human animal, her bark the best headstone. Every acorn was a soldier’s eye, and every slow-to-compost leaf the stubborn and spectral flesh of a forgotten grandmother who was once the stalwart matriarch of her den.
I woke weeping there in the belly of the tree with the wind whispering its secrets, my owl ways left behind in sleep but the songs of the dead still echoing in the hollow of my bones, still drumming slow and steady in my human heartache. I only had the language of nursery rhyme now, as I had left my more heathen words buried in my dreamscape, and I leapt from my nest singing rock-a-byes as the dawn glowed garnet on the graves.