Tag Archives: Whitecatgrove

GUEST POST // Tairngreacht by Whitecatgrove

The last hum of summer — I hunger
for more, a kinder year when all is not
withered on the vine. The burning boats
are not a kind sun, the wildfires are not
the butterfly migration. The cup
poured out again, by an unjust king
emptied and spent on wasted earth. Red
the riders to the house of red, red
the naked spirit who knocks on the door.
What a time to live — seeing a myth
paid in full, embodied and poured out
in a sea without fish, a summer
without fruit, a land without justice.

by WHITECATGROVE
© All rights reserved 2026

GUEST POST // Twinkle, Twinkle by Whitecatgrove

O south star through the trees seen — where are
your kin on this flustered night? Hidden,
shy, sequestered in the sky above
the cooling clouds and their sparkling motes.

The half-empty moon has tipped his cup,
let the dregs fall upon the slumbered Earth.
We travel from darkness to darkness,
the light intermittent, inconstant,

afflicted with mighty tracts of void.
Your perturbations are a matter
of atmosphere: that is to say, Earth,
not that mighty glare on the other side

of time. We are phantoms: you of the past
long-dissipated, me of the future
yet unimagined, each tender view
occluded by ice crystals and chance —

by WHITECATGROVE
© All rights reserved 2026

GUEST POST // Talking in Code by Whitecatgrove

Lay down, lay down, antlers fallen from
the crown. A king falls, a doe dies, and wise
the mouse who makes his house in the moss!
O the cost of this solitary life —
paid out in blood and mountaintops, the coin
of misunderstandings. The warbler
cannot understand the mockingbird’s
almost-speech. I’m tired. I’m talking in code.
The deer’s wild heart beats its mighty last.
This too shall pass. The vultures crack the bones.

by WHITECATGROVE
© All rights reserved 2025

GUEST POST // Cavalry by Whitecatgrove

They say: Be afraid. I regard the nettles
with their hard sting. The toothed hawthorn. Brambles
that grab your pantleg and refuse to let go.

Songbirds strafe the mighty hawk, drive him
branch to branch, then out of the sky. A swan
flexes angel wings and breaks a man’s arm.

A pebble does not relent, nor a splinter.
Thorns of a white rose can topple a king.
They say: Be afraid but the maddened doe

lashes with sharp hooves and the hunter goes
hungry. A cavalry of geese arrives
and no nest will be raided by serpents.

by WHITECATGROVE
© All rights reserved 2025

GUEST POST // Islands by Whitecatgrove

I who have known pain: You say, not this pain —
Your pain runs wider and deeper than mine.
Your pain thoroughly over-canyons mine
out-oceans mine, thrusting a fiery head
up from the mountaining deeps, your pain heaps
a new island stone by stone, bare and black,
licked by flame — your pain and mine are not the same —

to which I offer a palm and say: look.
That open sky swallows our smaller lives,
spits them out in some mightier place — or shits
them, it’s good to be humble. Look: a bird
leaf-beaked alights upon that lonely shore.
Not my bird or your bird, but its own bird,
other-bird, leading the way to fresh cliffs.

A bird brings seeds, drops seeds, shits seeds, a bird
drawn there to the heaped ruin you call yourself.
You cannot know this bird, you have always known
this bird, this holy spirit, white as the salt
in your tears. This bird nests in your pain, builds
paradise. Hope floats its coconut in,
unbidden, under that embracing sky.

by WHITECATGROVE
© All rights reserved 2024