The Journal of Mythic Arts: Poetry

Shapeshifter by Maureen McQuerry

There is a moment
when the creature seems to disappear.
Nothing remains, but a quivering
in the air, the invisible finger
that runs your ridge of spine

My students ask if it hurts
to become another. We’ve read
the stories of humans furred,
flesh erupting to wings, or scales,
gill-gasp of transformation.

I tell them some are stories of pursuit,
a dove answered with a hawk,
a hare with greyhound as reply.
Pursuer and pursued, their deft dance
that ended once with a grain of corn,
swallowed by a hen who birthed
the storyteller,Taliesin.

But what the students want to know is pain.
That remembered moment when
quills pierce skin, fingernails bleed
to claws. Beyond the window
winter’s first kiss startles the grass with frost.

I tell them yes,
there is always pain at birth or when,
our tent of flesh opens
like a door to the sky,
and something more, you must
lean close to hear
the single note of joy.

About the author: Maureen McQuerry is a teaching artist for Washington State and a gifted education specialist. She is the author of Wolfproof , (Idylls Press 2006) the first of a YA fantasy trilogy...read more

Copyright 2007 by Maureen McQuerry. This poem may not be reproduced in any form without the author's express written permission.

Hesitation Waltz by Wendy McVicker

All the world wilts
at mid–day, swoons
into the splayed

fragrance of iris, hot
sand–haunted scents
of dry grass—

wobbles,
stills,
already the air

heavy as old
lace, laden
with dust.

That mirror, leaning
in the attic, shape-shifting
as water, ghosts

drifting in its silvery
depths. Clouds,
whispers.

Raise your arms,
enter the darkness
that is this garment

slipping
over your head, breathe
powder and soot, look

into the shadows
of the glass—
your grandmother

standing there
in bare feet, gazing
into your eyes

across a century
of exile, and regret,
long avenues resonating

with departures—
never dreaming
of you, here

in early spring, opening
your arms and sliding
into a waltz on the crooked

boards, your sudden smile
as her skirt brushes
your ankles, whispers

on your skin—
and pollen
brushing the windowpanes

with gold

About the author: Wendy McVicker lives and writes in the beautiful green hills of Athens, Ohio. In her poetry, she seeks "to honor memory and the slow, deep process of knowing..."  read more.

Copyright © 2007 by Wendy McVicker. This poem may not be reproduced in any form without the author's express written permission.

Two Poems by Jane Yolen

After He Died

Did he see his daughter with her daughter
frantically driving home
from a New York City holiday,
her car maneuvering potholes
more surely than she maneuvered
the sudden hole in her heart?
Did he see her fighting the tears,
her nine year old daughter's fear
of returning to the house of death?
Did he know they would walk in
greeted with the relieving news
that his body was already gone?
Did he sigh like a whisper of wind,
or laugh with the freedom of letting go
of  that thinned-out  old body,
with the Auschwitz legs and protruding ribs,
the blinded eyes, the ears that could no longer
hear the difference between crow and not-crow?
Did he shake his head, finding himself
out of body, in the ether, perilously close
to some great being called God?
Or did he just, as he always supposed,
simply evaporate, becoming earth and sky,
ember and ash and, at the last, birdsong.

The Garden in April

Some small green shoots have already
broken out into daffodil grins.
Bunched roots of peonies
point green fingers toward the sky.
Dogwood and magnolia have burst
blossoms at the seams.
As always iris and lilies spread
like Atilla and his hordes
across borders, counties, countries.

It is spring. Everything in nature returns.
Everything.
So why are you not here,
rising up from my garden
as you used to rise from our bed?
From the brass double bed where our children
slept with us, or the new wooden bed
queen size, big enough for two complicated sleepers
after the children had gone out on their own.
Or the hospital bed, single and sterile,
where you died
in the middle of a March thaw.

April has returned to me everything,
everything but what means the most,
for I can dig deep in the garden,
down below the root system
and still not find you.

About the Author:
Jane Yolen is the multi-award-winning author of nearly three hundred books for adults, adolescents, and children... read more.

Copyright © 2007 by Jane Yolen. These poems may not be reproduced in any form without the author's express written permission.

Marvelous Reality by Margarita Engle

Lo real maravilloso was Alejo Carpentier's

name for daily life in a tropical land.

Translation turned the phrase

into a shape-shifter, wandering

between surrealism and fantasy -

magic realism - the wonders

of places still undiscovered,

or uninvented.

We have our choice now.

The landscapes are varied.

We are free to roam between

real marvels of the rain forests,

birthplace of madness and music,

and magical isms of the imagination,

homeland of myths and dreams.

The flight back and forth is perilous.

Writers are advised to travel light, forgetting all

that has ever been known.

About the Author:
Margarita Engle is a botanist and the Cuban–American author of three books about the island...read more.

Copyright © 2007 by Margarita Engle. This poem may not be reproduced in any form without the author's express written permission.

The Juniper Tree by Joseph Stanton

after a tale by the Brothers Grimm

She so desired a child
the world had to yield it up.
When she bled, by accident,
while cutting an apple
under the juniper tree,
the heart of things opened,
rising through the roots of the tree
and reaching everywhere,

her love sprouting in all the leaves
of every tree, a forest
where all the branches intertwined,
growing together, tangled
and dense with birds singing
and blossoms falling,
as gentle as the clouds of joy
drifting inside her mind.

She devoured
bright, scarlet juniper berries
until her swelling reached
its ripening and her body spoke
its perfect little boy,
as red as blood and white as snow,
and she was so very very happy,
strange to say,

that she could only die,
dreaming herself a tree
of never forgetting,
dreaming her beloved boy a song,
beyond most kinds of dying,
singing the gold’s shine,
the red shoe’s dancing,
the stone’s grind never ending.

About the Author:
Joseph Stanton has published poetry in a wide variety of journals and anthologies...read more.

Copyright © 2007 by Joseph Stanton. The poem may not be reproduced in any form without the author's express written permission.