Wolfsbane and Ivy

Where branches twist their boughs
Throughout the blackened woods
Broods that masque, Edenic asp
Sought on lip and hood.
Singing snare—
Fathered into this dance:
Where once love strode each wild's command,
Now vows more Satanic entrance...

String me wayward totem,
Shadows put to toothèd means.
Sheep bleat, fear our hollows:
Wolfsbane and ivy.

Abandoned to a purpose erst never in our seed—
"Whet the jaw! Blood the sabbat! Bewill us to fly!"
Appropriated, our bones for the church his cancer decreed,
Bonfire fruit to soothe the wound of the manger.
Virtue deemed to have fled these Hecatonchires
After Eden's serpent struck their gardened root,
Those born to join the forest in its worship
Turned and left the birthright to witchcraft and soot.

Now our psithurisms reek of spited sons,
Prayer made the pungence of their bodies burning.
But what blood said to devil our sylvan hymnals with its baths
Can efface such paths?

Come back!

Leaves green this skeletal reach in longing
For no further urge to fall...

Still, the unintestined grotesque
Of creation's inverted edifice:
Claws and palates slaked to usurper's whim,
Which promptly fosters worms and fungi within.

But where slaughters the spell,
An older law detrita knell...

Necrophagous shoots and spores
Unwind their constant gospel through the ruin of death,
Lichening the blasphemies beshrouding our dark
Until there's nothing left.

The rites that drank your babes
Unmade while we pine.
Oh, unbloodied air
Each prodigal spring divines!

Meet me ageless totem,
Shadows true and green.
I, darksome peace, I am the wood;
I am for your good.