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All-Father
All-Father, I came to you shrieking
in the darkness of my soul,
I came.
I came to you seeking,
wanting, needing
consumed by demons
of my own fear.
You heard.
You beckoned me
to the hanging tree
you beckoned.
You said I had to look within.
You said I had to hang
as you had hung
so long ago.
You said that burning
within was the key.
Then You touched me.
You pressed your bleeding hand
against my brow.
Your blade became mine.
Your bloody hand my grail.
I did not know then
what I would see.
I did not know
the realms of suffering
through which I would walk.
But I clung to that blade
tightly, my only surety.
I clung to the mystery
that I could hear
throbbing like a blood-stained tear
where you had blessed me.
The Old Ones say You are
a God of despair and pain.
Do they not know that You gather
Your suffering children to You
that You feel each wound
as though it were Your own?
I have felt your scarred hands,
drying my bitter tears.
I have heard Your incantations
lullabye to my hungry ears.
I have seen the scorched body
of that ancient tree on which You hung.
I have, as I ascended its body
heard Your whisper, felt Your arms.
I know that I am never alone.
You have carved this path for me,
turned away demons of fear and despair.
Where I walk, I see echoes of Your footsteps.
Guiding me, I hear Your magnificent song
leading me. I have found my own song too.
When I hung, in my heart, a thousand
worlds exploding before my eyes,
I heard the song of ancient spirits,
vitkar all, above the well of memory.
Even the web now sings for me.
And each sacrifice I have found inside
each bone placed beneath that tree
blessed in blood, hallowed in memory
marks the way for those I leave behind.
My heart I have placed in Your hands,
my voice sings with Yours.
No one told me
of the bliss IŽd find beneath the tree.
No one told me what I would see
beyond the pain, the struggle
the suffering and fear.
No one told me of the song
that heals
Now with runes scarring
heart and hands
I have learned to weave
strands of joy
and destiny.
I have stood
in the raging tempest
hearing my own dying cry.
Yet as you drew me
from the womb of the Tree
a thousand new possibilities
were given birth in me.
An I, your vitki,
sing anointed.
You are called God of battle,
God of grim despair.
But in Your fiery incantations,
it is my deepest self I have found.
Songs of power, of passion, of healing.
And it all began when I accepted
that blade you pressed into my hands.
And when the runes from my lips are forced,
when I grasp again those burning brands,
I feel Your hands guiding mine,
and all the casting shrieks through the worlds
a song of joy I have found in You,
my Father.
© Galina Krasskova