A web of weird is cast –
Three sisters weave the wick:
Clothos, who spins the thread of human life,
Lachesis, who determines the length,
And Atropos, who cuts the thread of the quick.
Twisting raw fibers,
They form a cocoon,
Over and under, around and through:
They proclaim my fate and raise an alarm:
A mortal soul is born!
Mine is a cloth torn from the loom
As the spirits whirl and dance,
Chortling with glee.
Random misery is my lot –
I cannot escape the gods’ own curse.
I dwell in a cloud of blackness,
My innocence plucked from my youth.
Cancer of sorrow sprouts like a fungus
In the dank undergrowth of my mind.
Tangled, ensnared, choked by the ropes,
I claw at the garrote and pray,
“Great Norns, transform me!
Let me become uroboros,
Declaring, like the Scots queen,
‘In my end is my beginning.’”
Kerry Vincent © 1992
