Notes towards a New Rune Poem

....
In the woods of my history,
a forgotten people sliced an alphabet,
not their own and never spoken,
into coins cut from branches.
With these runes they cast themselves
into the future-- only their secrets
survive. ....

(from "Runes" )

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Last year about this time I started work on a Rune Poem. It took off in unexpected directions: my notes for the poems of "instruction" on making, casting, and interpreting the runes were the seed for the long poem "Too Strong to Stop, Too Sweet to Lose." You can still see the seeds in some of the component fragments of "Too Strong," like this one:

What is our ancient knowledge?

To track by broken grass,
tell the future
in the moon's fogged mirror.
To cast runes from the hand --
that bowl of bone and leather --
Their fall, their scritch and jumble.
The hawk's shift
across a branch of shadow.

But to backtrack. Why a Rune Poem? I was entranced by Jim Paul's translation of the Anglo poem (written in Old English) in his book The Rune Poem: Wisdom's Fulfillment, Prophecy's Reach. How much that poem tells, with how little.

Here's a poem that's not much more than an elaboration A is for Apple, B is for Bird. Each letter in the futark, the rune alphabet, gets a name and three lines. A bit of naturalistic description, a bit of time-worn wisdom, and a nudge in the direction of mystic interpretation. The mystic interpretation is important, because the runes were not used by the rune peoples to write down speech, but as talismans and marks of power. Small crafts.

And yet, how much of the life of the rune people is preserved in these small crafts -- these little boats. Their runes are named the torch, the dicecup, the horse, the sea, ice, birch, oak, need, wealth, the clay, the star, the day. And more. From the mere names of the runes the life of the people casts a shadow.

And from the rune poem, a brighter shadow. Take the rune Wyn: Joy.

Joy comes not to the soft to the untouched, complacent with the plenty of town

A wild people, a hunting people, a people of the forest and the sea, then. But a communal people nonetheless. Cen, the Torch (from whence the English "keen")

By its flame the living know the torch its brightness illuminating life inside, where we rest.

I can't do justice to The Rune Poem without quoting all of it. The fragments build to something more than any of them suggest. But I hope I can begin to show what I mean. I was fascinated.

I wanted to try it for myself: to create an alphabet poem, of common objects and actions, to create a system of interpretation so that it could be "cast." To see what of my life and the life of my time can be launched out onto the sea in these little boats. A poem to be mysterious and common a thousand years from now.

So, I tried it. I'm tucking fragments of it -- it's not done -- behind the "MORE" here, as my life seems to have a bit of sex in it, and can't be read in polite company. If you are polite company you may want to skip it.

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