Sometimes a Wild God

Sometimes a Wild God

Tom Hirons

Excerpt:

    ...You cough again,
    Expectorate the snakes and
    Water down the whiskey,
    Wondering how you got so old
    And where your passion went.

    The wild god reaches into a bag
    Made of moles and nightingale-skin.
    He pulls out a two-reeded pipe,
    Raises an eyebrow
    And all the birds begin to sing....

More details:

This poem may well be the reason you're on my site. If you'd like to skip straight to the poem, click here.

I wrote it a few years ago now, after the first few lines had been going around my head for months. I thought they were someone else's lines - I kept looking for who'd written the poem and it seems that it didn't yet exist, so I thought I should finish the poem, see what happened after those lines.

The poem is now available as a book originally published by Hedgespoken Press, with beautiful black-and-white ink illustrations by Rima Staines, now available from feral angels press. The book is printed on 100% recycled paper and card, and printed by a workers' co-op in the UK.

I heard of the poem through Gordon White, will get into that in the next post.

Rune Soup essay from Gordon White related to the poem

Matt and Sarah invited me to appear on their podcast, The Campfire’s Edge, to discuss hunting, animism, and sacred custodianship. You can listen to our great chat here.

The concepts have been rolling around in my mind along with some of the videos I have been making about trauma and the Shadow. The next one is from inside my old truck because it blew a gale at the shoreline I tried to film it on.

Bill Plotkin, originator of Soul Craft, said words to the effect of “civilisation is only 72 hours deep”. This means that people discover their ‘real’ selves after only a very short time away from phones and electricity and so on. The work is predicated on the -correct, as far as I can tell- assertion that ‘Nature’, so-called, is identical to the human psyche. This itself has implications for hunting and Custodianship. Where exactly are our hunting grounds if Nature is identical to the psyche? What are we hunting? What is hunting us? (Before even mentioning David Paulides’s Missing 411 material.) And what does it mean that we flood Nature with forever-chemicals and other pollutants?

So, in addition to the podcast interview, I would like to share one of my favourite poems: Tom Hirons’s Sometimes A Wild God ...