The Haunting of the Valkyrie Ghost-Maiden
A Poem for this Tuesday, of which the angel of war is given charge, inspired in part by Henry Corbin's meditations on the Fravarti (which he also equates with the Germanic Valkyrie).
There upon a hill,
Upon an ancient burial ground,
Where the fallen lay silent,
Because the living can no longer bare their plaintive cries,
The song of a thousand, thousand hearts rent in two
By the bloodthirsty blade of that aeons-old angel of war,
Drowned out by the sounds of a world whose own battles
Are fought for countless unnecessary necessities.
And though these battles may be won
it does not abate the slow death of the soul
hidden, as it is, behind the war mask.
Upon that hill,
Those sacred grounds,
That soil of dreaming, wounded-hearted war minstrels,
A frail dwelling-place stands.
A meagre accommodation of only four rooms.
The walls of each chamber adorned with crimson,
Coloured with the memory of the spilled blood of battle.
Here it was, and here now alone,
It could be heard,
Beyond the croaking of crows and the whistling wind,
the echo of the past.
Of a time that never was and always is.
For this place is haunted by one who moves in rhythms
that stirs the homesick heart.
Those war-makers slain on the field forever live the sweet-bitter longing.
Their hearts cleaved at that moment
where they fight in frenzied fidelity
For that which they shall never again see.
Where they shall never again be.
What they shall never again have.
In suffering the ekstasis of battle- death
They dwell now in the lost lands of nostalgia.
Perhaps the one haunting this humble hearth
Is one of the Valkyrie, battle-goddess
singing salve to those sundered souls.
Calling them home.
Her voice echoes through the chambers of that place,
And her soft footsteps glide
for she is born aloft by wings of heaven.
(be they phoenix wings that are her hauntings halo?)
She wanders the hallways
Her aspect a strange eldritch beauty
Brightening dark corners, such that the shadows dance
in scenes of minstrelsy-infused terror and astonishment
In symbols of a language lost to time.
A forgotten tongue, mysterious,
glimpsed by the shuddering heart of the poet
In an instant of stolen breath.
This ghost-maiden speaks that very tongue.
Her every movement is to communicate in this language of heaven.
The very same that the stars speak in their glittering,
The river upon her surface, sun glimmering,
The sound of the cool evening breeze through the tree speaks it,
Reading it as she goes from the leafโs veined intricacies.
So it is, that while the mocking minutia of a world
Weighed down in the mundane
May mute the voice of the eternal past
May silence the song of the war-poets pen
May stifle the cries of the heart-rent soldier
The Cosmos itself lives and breathes the call
of the Valkyrie ghost-maiden who haunts those halls.
Of that lodging of longing.
Upon that hill,
On hallowed ground,
Of the blood drenched soil of the heart-wounded fallen.