walking over my grave.

Cherry

By celticman

Sat, 11 Jul 2026
  • 76 reads
9 comments
 

Shamans and shy creatures whisper of danger,

Souls without dreams are lost in the shade.

Staring at screens in a world full of shadows,

A hagstone of falsehoods where ghosts are remade.

Raising their dead in a mansion of lies,

Shedin, the fallen, now banished below.

Lilith, the first wife, who steals from the night,

Seducing the lost where the dark rivers glows.

Caught in the middle of mortal and god,

Truth must be weighed by a feather of air.

The epic of you, and of me, and Enkidu,

Rushing like wind through the ghost of despair.

Ass-dung and Aeschylus, murdered and gone,

Wildflowers bloom on the lip of your grave.

The knot is eternal, the wheel is reborn,

Fortune will break what the spirit forgave.

Bhootas and eaters of all that will come,

Appeased by an obol that is minted in mind.

Tricksters and shapeshifters, kitsune thieves,

Erasing your name from the code of mankind.

Ten cruel magistrates judging the dead,

A rootless tree grows with a monkey’s grimace.

Ash fires of gluttony, famine and greed,

Burn through the rights without honour or grace.

Neo-pagan Samhain, the city of dread,

Kullulu, kulith, and the ghouls of the sea.

The fire is waiting. The shade is cast.

Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.

I’ll set you free.

Certificate PG
Poem
Spiritual

Comments

Submitted by Curtis Ray Jones on

Dark images, grim and unrelenting solicitation, free? Think I'll pass on their offer, pretty sure the freedom they offer can only be purchased with a human soul.

Well written, not pretty but it wasn't supposed to be. It has a racking sort of rythym that is unsettling.

Ray 

Rayjones

Submitted by celticman on

cheers Ray, my poetry is more often miss than hit, and claims I don't know what I'm doing would be fair. 

 

Submitted by insertponceyfre... on

I think you've caught the dark side of these bleak days and summed it up well.

 

Submitted by celticman on

cheers insert. darkish but spots of light. 

 

Submitted by insertponceyfre... on

I hope so!

 

Submitted by Turlough on

Shedin, the fallen, now banished below.

Or maybe just in the shed.

Turlough

Submitted by GlosKat on

Oh dear, I'm going to have to be Mrs Picky here.  It's actually Shedim.  I had to look the word up 

Shedim are spirits or demonic beings in Jewish mythology, often depicted as morally ambivalent entities with both human and supernatural traits.

But there's absolutely no reason they can't live in sheds.  I found a hedgehog living in mine once.

 

Submitted by Turlough on

You say Shedim, I say tomato. You say spirits, I say rakia.

More than fifty years ago, a kid in my class at school in Leeds told me that he used to go shedding. I had no idea what he meant so I asked him to explain. He said it was what happened when people were too young to be expected by their parents to do full-on house burglaries, so instead they’d break into garden sheds to steal expensive lawnmowers, bicycles etc. It was a more lucrative alternative to doing an evening paper round.

About thirty years ago I was invited to a barbecue in Cirencester. It was at the home of two people who had top jobs at National Power in Swindon. I didn’t really like them but everybody I knew was going as it was looked upon as a bit of a team building event (ugh!). Towards the end of the evening I complimented the female member of the host couple on their fine big house and beautiful garden. She thanked me and told me it was perfect location for shedding. I had no idea what she meant so I asked her to explain. She said it was what happened when middle aged couples held dinner parties and a man from one couple and a woman from another couple might want to do intimate things together so they’d go off to the posh shed at the bottom of the garden.

Since then I’ve often wondered if my friend from Leeds ever bumped into my friends in Cirencester in the course of his work.

For me, shedding is what I do to friends when I’ve decided that I don’t really like them.

Yesterday morning I found 247 wasps in my shed.

Turlough

Submitted by GlosKat on

Shedding to me means what my lovely long haired cat Knotty used to do.  It involved hoovering rather than swinging or burgling.

Doesn't Ludo shed, or has he lost all his fur fighting all the cats in Bulgaria ?