George Frederic Watts

The Morrigan

Julie Shiel

She carries death
on blue-black wings,
heavy with bloody prophesy
and the sheen of superstition,
and she divines madness
with the softness
of feathered rush.

The stars are collapsing
in her avian eyes,
silenced in ebon flurry
of moon-slicked wings,
lost in primeval mythos
of her sacred birth.

She is the Phantom Queen,
and under a dawning twilight,
she cries destruction
with the cawing voice of crows,
and casts skeletal runes
across the indistinct sky
into circular patterns
of blood-soaked fertility.