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Yes, go ahead.

Whisper your wickedest and most fickle promises in my ear to stir me awake, and I’ll lock my legs around you like I do every year, bidding you stay and color my world in bejeweled oranges and lustful crimsons until that final evening when I pass through the warm-water veil into the ether. I’ve been sleepwalking these last long months, I think.

I’ve been crushing my stubborn eyes closed to the unholy rays of the tireless sun by day, and stroking my swollen lips in anguished longing for you by night. I’ve been turning my frigid shoulder to those who bubble on about the bliss they find in warmer days, and, all the while, I’ve been waiting for my wildest lover to return to my bed.

Now, here you are! Come closer so I can bury my face in your ever-cool ephemeral flesh.

No one smells like you, and if I could bottle your musk of smoking pine-wood and rotting maple leaves, I would bathe in it every morning, I would swallow a drop here and there to get me through those torturous too-hot days, and I would spit just a little in the faces of those who think me mad for loving you the way I do, with every breath a body-prayer in your honor and my very skeleton a pagan totem handcrafted by a cunning demoness sculptor, gift-wrapped in flesh, and left on your grave until you ascend from the steaming Underworld under the Harvest Moon and carry me home.

Oh, my love! Answer me this: Why do you stay away so long, leaving me shivering in the shadowy dark under the late December moon and keeping your wretched distance while the flowers begin to bloom, visiting me only in dreams on those endless, sticky days?

I am a loyal Witch, indeed, and I could never betray you as you do me, escaping from my bed like a wayward specter just when I think this year might be different, just when I think you might just stay here in my stone house and wake with me every morning, pulling me close and offering me something hot and bitter to drink while you rekindle the hearth-fire and wax poetic about love and loss.

I’ll click my tongue and tell you what a majestic and clever beast you are, and you’ll drop your chin and look up at me with only your black-mirror eyes, letting your twisted horns show and leaping atop me like a virile, dark-winged creature bred in hell only to penetrate me and infuse my magick with a particular, over-spiced flavor only sourced from two-tongued passion and divine, whole-body surrender.

Yes, you’re right. If I were to know you were staying after the dark 13^th moon sets, if we were to be together when the snow falls, when the grasses begin to rise, when the wildflowers bloom, and, later, when the locusts sing, I surely would not love you as I do.

Many lonely nights have I fallen to my knees and beseeched every ancient deity in the Pagan pantheon to grant me eternal Autumn, to send my lover home early, to let my seasonal soulmate lick me awake and bring me a cool breeze.

Often in Spring I stare long from my window into my woods in pitiful hope that your tough-skinned shape will step out from the shadows and the sprouting-babe leaves stirring awake atop the branches will turn straight from pea-green to apple-red, skipping over their fruition just this once.

You keep telling me it’s the spiral dance of our beauteous romance I yearn for, that I open my legs to your wandering nature as much as to your coy wit and lithe hands. You say It’s death you love, not me, but I wonder if the truth of these vows I’ve made to you rests nestled deep in the soil of a cemetery lit only by the swelling Blood Moon.

If I were to dig deep enough there, I wager I’d find the bones of who I used to be just last year when you left, and the year before that, and on through the centuries and ages when, time and time again, you showed me the beauty between death and birth.

Ah! Enough of this deep talk! You’re here now, and that’s all that matters. Put on the bone-and-antler crown I made for you, and I’ll grow my horns long to match yours. Let’s do things that make the Summer gods blush, and I promise I won’t grieve too soon for your inevitable passing.

This Witch is yours and yours alone, my fork-tongued darling, my long-fanged temptation, and I’ve never felt more alive than I do now with the entire Autumn season having its wicked way with me while a chilly wind blows through the window and turns these fleeting, bedside candle flames to ghostly smoke-rise. Take me, you haunting creature.

I’m yours as long as you’ll have me, until my now-enflamed, over-wet walls dry in your absence and my breath fogs in the Winter cold while I whisper your name into the fertile dark, willing the Wheel of the Year to turn early and bring you home.

***

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Danielle Dulsky

Danielle Dulsky is a heathen visionary, Aquarian mischief-maker, and word-witch. Author of 'Seasons of Moon and Flame: The Wild Dreamer’s Epic Journey of Becoming', 'The Holy Wild: A Heathen Bible for the Untamed Woman' and 'Woman Most Wild' (New World Library 2020, 2018, 2017), Danielle teaches internationally and has facilitated embodiment trainings, wild circles, communal spell-work, and seasonal rituals since 2007. She is the founder of The Hag School and the lead teacher for the school’s Flame-Tender Facilitator Training and online coven, The Hag Ways Collective, an E-RYT 500 and YACEP, a Fire-Keeper for Ord Brighideach, and a dedicant to Irish-Celtic spirituality. She believes in the power of wild collectives and sudden circles of curious dreamers, cunning witches, and rebellious artists as well as the importance of ancestral healing, embodiment, and animism in fracturing the longstanding systems supporting environmental unconsciousness and social injustice. Parent to two beloved wildings and partner to a potter, Danielle fills her world with nature, family, art-making, poetry, and intentional awe.

Latest posts by Danielle Dulsky (see all)

• The Chicken-Witch of the Grove. {excerpt} - November 4, 2024
• She Speaks the Language of the Crows, That Woman: Syrupy Medicine for the Autumn-Hungry Heart. - November 4, 2024
• Joy Magick and Heathen Delights: The Wilds of the Summer Hags. - November 4, 2024