Ajax Kallistrate

Prosperity never follows on
the heels of servitude.

October 9, 2024

We are the sons and daughters
of the kings of the earth.

In the ruckus of the bluejay's croak
dwell the old gods.

In the swaying of stormy branches
dwell the old gods.

In the hoofprints left in a muddy field,
in the whirl of insects caught
in a shaft of sunlight,

in the reflection of autumn leaves
on still water, in the smell of
pine needles crushed
underfoot,

in the gaping mouth of a leaping
trout, in the scattering of
stars across the vast
firmament,

in the blood that sanctifies
the hunter's arrow, in the
blown bloom
of the dog
rose,

in the crash of the sea over
bladderwrack, in the
reverent silence
of new fallen
snow,

in the bright sweetness
of blackberries, in the
trembling flash of
an aspen
leaf,

in the shining globe of a grape,
in the billowing colossus
of a thunderhead
dwell the
old gods.

Their voices are our voices.
Their footfalls are our footfalls.

They walk with us, hoary mountain
men long dead and still full of mirth.

Titans crowned with thunderheads,
blanketed with cloaks of
new fallen snow,
their eyes
the
piercing stars,
and at their sides
the golden shafts of aspen.

Behold them.
Honor them.
Drink with them.

Avow our kinship.

For we are the sons and daughters
of the kings of the earth.

October 9, 2024

Bludgeoned by the hammer
and sickle, I yet look up
into that streaky
morning
sky
and wonder
at ancestors who
looked up in the dead
of winter and did not know
if they'd see the morrow
and yet felt neither
hunger nor
despair,
know-
ing
only
that they
were mortals in
the hands of
the gods.

October 1, 2024

We stumble over headless beasts,
ten stories tall, and tell each
other we walk among men
as noisome fog boils at
our feet, a putrid
miasma;
blind,
we stumble
and sink our hands
into bloody recesses
and greet them as friends,
our speech lost to the deafening
roar of headless animals,
their voices the scream
of the wind over open
wounds,
instruments of death;
knee deep in our own decay,
we yield to the instinct to flee;
weeping;
our throats raw
with the burden of emptied
skulls, we plead, deaf
and blind, stumbling
over the headless
remnants
of giants,
we
drown,
nameless
scaffolding for
a mass grave.
Unremembered.
Alone.

September 26, 2024

In the light of cool August, who knows what radiant September might bring to our foxglove people, tripping over stepping stones set in our path by horny handed beasts slavering in appetite for the flesh of infants?

Might we reach out to our nearest coz and lift him to his feet, lengthen his spine after so long bowed beneath the damning burden of the constricting serpent, the mother of lies, suckling the wealth of our blood from sixty five million wounds inflicted by sixty five million razor sharp tongues, an outpouring of purest fire once held aloft by calloused hands used only to the weight of the sword?

Might we stand together, woven into an immovable wall, a phalanx, a fortress of duty and obligation to kith and kin and race and nation and God?

Might we unite our long silenced voices and bellow a challenge to the savage interlopers whose whips have lathered the backs of too many generations to count, the youth of our men plowed under foreign soil, the labor of our women traded away for shaven coins, the brilliance of our children clouded by the poisoned well of electronic sloth?

Shall that September sun ignite the passion of our race for unchained liberty, for the planting of an ancient tree that will bear new fruit, for the sacrifice that lights the way for the twin gods of war and renewal?

Shall truth be our guide, however thorny and narrow the path?

Do we decide?

Or has that choice been made for us?

Inside our heads, lobotomized by inescapable torment?

Have we reached the end of that road, led like sheep to the end of that blade?

Are we docile now, colonized livestock for the tables of parasites?

Has this long winter frozen our ancestral blood?

They await us.
They await our hand raised in defiance or limp in despair.
They await our footfall on the necks of our enemies or onto our knees into an open grave.

The door closes.

It's time.

September 24, 2024

They cut away what matters,
scissors, grinders,
they cut you
free
of
what
matters,
their machine
wants nothing of
families, fresh air, futurity,
so they cut you out,
cut a shape out
of you, they
pull you
apart,
they
put
you back
together in a shape
you can't remember,
so smile, they
say, smile
for
the
camera,
we're all together now.

September 24, 2024

nature is my church,
my silence, reverence.

August 28, 2024

i listen to the old gods and
the old gods have bent an ear,
girded round by thickets,
they've yet bent an ear.

who listens to barren old women?

ha!

tricksters, an unnamed few.
girded round by thickets,
long obscured, untended,
an overgrown garden.

lush!

canted polewise in our direction,
at last. that two sided coin whose
faces once laughed at ancestral rites
grew cold and sad (without remorse)
at our withdrawal.

they understood none of it,
as we understood none of it,

led by the puppeteering
tunes of the Pied Piper,
the slaver,
the trafficker,
the rootless wanderer,
the stranger,
the mocker,
the liar,
the usurper,
the tyrant,
the destroyer,

to forget (without forgiving)
the compassing direction of
that path, anterior, to find
where they've been hidden,
and girded round by thickets,
have bent an ear, eager.

do remember

the blood, the purifying fire, the stars,
the towering mountain that stands
above the uncanny valley where
our people have been buried alive
under two thousand years of sand,

for it is this, and not the other,
that shall beat
beat
a trail upon fallen leaves
to mend a broken vow and
make whole a piecemeal sacrifice.

ours for us, our own, again.
we make it so.

so says the old gods, in a whisper
girded round by a subtle laugh,
speckled as they are by yew
netted sun, they've bent an ear
and listened to our plaintive coil.

even blind as we are blind,
nature cries out to nature,
and a footfall narrows the ear,
and upon that loamy shore

we find each other.

August 28, 2024