Moonlitmirror - Could Ever Hear By Tale Or History

The children yearn for the archives

Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979; from 'The Moose'

There are roses in your cheeks

and violets in your eyes -- 

all devotion to the setting skies

eagle: so what do you think about stigmata

prometheus: you know we're in a pre-christian myth, right? like that word doesn't exist yet. your dumb joke is anachronistic.

eagle: stigma talons in your flesh

something i wish i had realized earlier: you can write poems on the same subject more than once. you can write, paint, draw the same thing over and over if you want to. you can spend your whole life making art about oranges. i think i always felt this pressure to get it right the first time like i couldn’t go back and use that inspiration again. but you can. you can go back and revisit it. you can pick up the conversation again and again if you have more to say.

Tuesday, 28th September 2021

My reality is shaped in colours; a painting blurred in depths of hues, brushed by a wandering silence.

Many folktales throughout different cultures feature a heroine being given the impossible task of sorting through grains/seeds– whether that be picking them from the ashes, from between each other, or from their rotting counterparts.

In this task, she often does as much as she can before submitting to a higher power, whether that power recognizes her virtue or she directly asks for help varies based on the culture and tale.

Featured are eight such tales, most of which can be categorized into “Snake Bride” (ATU 425) type tales or “Cinderella” (Both often ATU 510 in the folklore index– Cinderellas are specifically ATU 510A)

The circle puts them in no particular order, as “origins”  and lineages are muddied, and many of the current incarnations have been influenced by each other, though Ye Xian is the oldest known “complete” version of Cinderella.

Snake Brides:

Psyche, Eros and Psyche (Greco-Roman)

Sukkia, The Snake’s Bride (India)

Donan Sampakang Tale about Gansaļangi and Donan Sampakang (Indonesian)

Cinderellas:

Aschenputtel (German)

Tam, Tấm and Cám (Vietnam)

Unnamed Heroine The Wonderful Birch (Finish & Slavic)

Ye Xian (Chinese)

Neither (ATU 480B– Stepmother and Stepdaughter)

Vasilisa, Vasilisa the Wise (or Beautiful) (Slavic)

Changeling Child

I thought jewelweed pods were fairy peas and I picked them carefully so they would not pop and spoil my gift. I laid them carefully on leaf platters, along with berries my mother told me not to eat and colorful flower petals. A perfect feast.  I had a stone circle built, a fairy circle, a castle, an altar, and there I left my offerings. Sometimes I wanted a wish in return. Sometimes I needed the fae to remember that I knew how to take care of my own kind. 

smoking cigarette & sipping mango, watching the world spin: fighting the urges, my mind is a maze, a cage of contradiction, lost in addiction, losing to my misery, life presents me blessing, good things, in which candid moments of bliss, lie awake & alive, alive as essence, greenery is all I need, nature's naked gifts of life, breathe breath into me, ouroboric wandering idol, cosmic ghost; inward & outward, great thing of wondrous depth, not in death.

George Seferis, tr. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, from The Collected Poems 1924-1955; “And if the soul”