three birds

A chrysalis rises over a meadow shaking with cowslips, stitchwort, spears of asphodel, and slinking slow-worms, Britain’s largest lizards. The light is dimming for the evening, an arctic blue overtakes the sky. Three birds are singing - their songs are detailed below. The wagtail, oscillating and sparkling.

Three dawns three dawns three dawns all with the same sunsame sunsame sun

The alarm-call of the chiffchaff.

up up up up up up up up up up up up up up up up up up up get up something rises

And the blackbird, who has a long, long song.

In the gentle night a hum-humming in the trees
Worms giggling up from the inside something
Growing, a pregnant pond wrestling with
Itself and disturbing the surface two two two two two two
Reflections of the same leaf
A girl looking down at herself and a man-he-he looks up
Magick is ritual repeated and the patterns revealed from incessant recurrence
Something golden in the morning that looks like the dawn but that is a misalignment -
What stands-up from the grass is an older woman
bearing the many-fingered reflection of the nightlamps glow-glow-glow, in the
gentle-gentle night

Your phone is charging at your bedside but losing as much as it gains. A deadly sickness has befallen this house. You were only meant to glance at the past and use it’s hair and touch to cast spells for the future. But you craned your neck and stared and stared and stared and stared and stared and stared and stared and stared and last night, that smaller, ever-further away body of yours did not just flex and angle herself for your memorygaze but looked up indignant and put down her book, her tools, her letter to her lover and sprang to her feet and - running full pelt right out of the past she is running up to meet you, she has hands outstretched, bitten nails reaching for your eyes and kicking legs aiming for the backs of your shins as you take uncertain steps away from her frightful childlike figure now far too close knocking you into a morning future where, crossing the boundary and gasping awake it is raining so hard that the droplets hurt your skin -

The chrysalis twists. Above the meadow it is like an egg, hung-strung by the iron cotton of a spiders web. The silk pads shudder and sink back, and the worm that emerges is half-born, legs and eyes and already wounded, dehydrated and blind. The birds do not want it.