The Half-light.

The flux of day and night

hangs like a curtain

as the tattered shrouds

of day, break and run

before the onslaught

of a marauding dusk.

The twin trees on the Edge

always so familiar,

take on sinister form,

stretching creaking limbs

out to embrace a new mistress.

Creatures that had lain hidden

in dens and grassy hide-a-ways

venture into their world,

blurred visions

on the edge of in-between.

Here in the half-light,

Where the trickster

turns from stone,

you glimpse a figure

dancing among

the shadow boughs.

He speaks the lore of trees,

The language of birds;

He is birch, alder, hazel,

apple, willow and oak:

he is shaman, priest, poet,

warrior, prophet and soothsayer.

Yet as night falls

the vision blurs,

the toadskin veil obscures

the riddle of hunter and hunted,

and all merge

as monstrous shadows

into the crowing darkness.