First time poet

He was dying.

There was something in the Primavera, the spirit of sentience given each and every member of the kinfolk, that told him that this season would be his last snowfall.

He did not mind, having had lived. Yet - his body was ready; but his mind was not.

His hind claws were worn to stubs. Not bad for an elderly badger. No more burrows, no more wars. Still some fight. The middle claw on his left paw hurt constantly now, having had broken it off in a long ago duel, when both he and the Six Groves were young.

Nevertheless, he was restless. Craving a challenge, one last duel for a duellist. He was unable to do so physically, so the fight would have to be burrow-bound. One more creation then, one wild frolic in the glade of the gift of mind.

This uncertainty born of the final certainty burdened him the entire spring season. It was not until the hellebores had come and gone, chartreuse-upon-gold; and the bluebells were at their zenith did he settle on an idea.

 It came to him over morning a honey-and-barley first meal – to compose a death verse, like the poet-warriors of old. Treading tradition with few spare lines to commemorate a life. What glory.

He had been a spears-badger in the dawn of his youth, and an engineer at the noon of his life’s day. Perhaps now, in his twilight hours, he would attempt to be a poet.

He sat in one of the innumerable boughs of the Woodmother, perched high amongst the mingled flora of her oak leaves and pine needles. Below him, the meandering ripple of a sprawling lake played infinitely; its vast waters a whispering metronome to his quill scratchings.

A leaf from a maple
Ten thousand claws
A myriad glories
Honoured kinfolk in honoured hours

He was so unversed in verse; that he could not gauge whether the words he had written were of value. Would this shy stanza be his wisdom to kinfolk, generations hence? Would it inspire warriors and peacemakers alike

The four lines stared back at him, and they held indeed a fractal meaning to be duelled with or engineered toward perfection. There was a warmth in his gut that spread to his chest, the furs in his lower back tingling. Familiar adrenaline. A struggle worthy of an elderly badger.

He had known a muntjac once, proud and haughty; who fancied themselves both poet and warrior. The cervine was of some minor house from the southern tip of the Old Noble Star. The muntjac was red of antler and soft of fur, a beautiful kinfolk. The haughty scion of a lesser house who had loved to put each moment into verse, no matter how mundane. The fall of leaf; the charge of kinfolk on the battle line. The daybreak in the barrack ten days into a ceasefire. A stray black feather.

That muntjac had died, a stone to the head, during the wars against the cauldrons.

These were autumn thoughts; but the high summer was still here. Nestled in the heights of the Woodmother; the aging general caught the light at its most burnished moment. What power caused some young oak and its companion pine to be intertwined so, growing for hundreds of years, into a towering single organism that scraped the sky? Was it of the hex, that same fey mystery that gave all kinfolk mind and spirit? It certainly seemed that way, for the Woodmother towered above all other trees in the Six Groves. So tall, the very top housed the Lighthouse, the seeing station of the Rooks Errant, to gauge trouble in the land. So very wide, its countless boughs and twists and branches were home to innumerable kinfolk, their workshops, and headquarters for every kind of organisation.

 But it was not the scale of the Woodmother that impressed most. It was her beauty at this moment. Golden light gilding every whorl of the living wood. Summer humidity giving way to a crisper breeze that whistled amongst the oak leaves. Acorns aplenty, still forming in their cupolas.

 Cicadas chirped. Below him, a cerulean forest floor of water and foam rippled. These waters of the Grand Fishery, the greatest marvel of engineering the Corps had ever created. He had hand in it. Where his participation in the wars brought shame that his poem masked as glory; this glorious source of food and homes for the kinfolk brought him pride that he had to mask as humility.

 The sight of the waters and the places it took him made him review his work.

 Was it appropriate to leave a legacy for future generations, scribbled in the blood of the cauldrons and generational enmity? Sure, he had written of glory and honour, their shared purpose and the kinfolk they fought for. But was it not better to create a legacy that fed, a life that had meaning given what it was lived for; rather than how it was lived?

 There was peace now, between bat and their fellow kinfolk; and the chiropteran denizens of the Sounding Tree were due also their honour in belonging to the animals that had received the privilege of the Primavera. The hard won peace.

 He tried again, but the words came with great difficulty. 

Ten thousand claws, reave a wound generations long
Ten thousand paws, build hearths by stone by stone
Ten thousand tears, the scars grow puckered, dry
Ten thousand years, this forest abides. 

It was hours to write these few verses. New words replaced originals, entire lines re-scribbled in the margins. He threw out what he wrote entirely three times, before coming back to this first set again. The ancient general stared at this stanza, furrows deeper than they usually were.

Best let it sit. 

***

The elderly kindred made some preparation to visit his friends and colleagues throughout the Woodmother. It was a single organism, a monumental giant tree made of up two seedlings grown from time immemorial – a towering Scots pine that scraped the sky itself; and a volumes, heaven-encompassing oak. No kinfolk could tell where one stopped and the other began. But folk of all kinds nestled in its trunks, branches, lofts and leaves. Rodent burrows peppered its base. Rookeries dotted its skyward aspects. And hidden in the boughs, homes of thousands of kinfolk, along with workshops, and divisional headquarters of everything from the Redwood guard to the ranging Rooks Errant to his own Royal Engineering Corps. 

The kin shouldered his bag, and began his walk. It would be three weeks before he returned, as each friend he visited was delighted to see him. They invited him to share of their meals and their burrows. He cradled tiny falcon chicks and rabbit kittens, drank golden mead and swapped stories with sun-beaten otters and time-weathered owls. They would love him and toast him and sing with him, the people of the Woodmother. He loved them all too. He had given his life to them, in war and now in peace.

Of material things, he had already given most of his possessions away to those most in need, and here he had a few left for those he had yet to visit. His drafting pen to his former protégée, now the Chief of Bridge Builders herself. He gave a sash of the finest brocade to the jackdaw widow of a lieutenant who once served under him in the wars. He sang with one of his many grand children songs as old as the Primavera, tucking them in for the night; myths of mice and the legends of their bravery in the first days before the Six Groves ever had the name. He gave his medals to his eldest; his journals – straw-bound and carefully preserved, each stamped with the blue wax of his seal on the cover – to his youngest. At each place, he did not overstay his welcome. And at each place, he did the folk at that dwelling honour as they did to him.

He returned, three weeks hence, renewed with energy to complete his poem. There was a new thought in his mind, as there was in his heart. Those worn and broken hind claws could still love, and hug, and drink to the world and to the young and to the future.

Last month, he had aimed to write a death verse. Now, he aimed to write a life verse.

Turning the page, he wrote again:

Squawks and squalls
Spears and shattered formations
But an outgoing tide
Leaving harder work – reconciliation
Conversation, family; the lakeside detritus
remains.

Squawks and squalls
A kinship with all kinfolk
An incoming cloud on sun beaten day
Resting time now – contemplation
Compassion, strangers; a lodge-dam
ever re-built.

Better. From his well positioned lodgings, he could see the Newdam in the distance. This primal feat of engineering was the dam that made the Grand Fishery at its feet and the marshes of the Mistgrove at its heads; from the waters that ran from the Final Fangs. The heart of the dam was ancient, before even his time; and work on it had started even before the Primavera, when the kinfolk were just mere unthinking animals. It would be here long after his bones were indistinguishable from the soil. 

As each log in the dam rotted and wore away, another replaced it. As each generation of engineers passed, their children and their children children’s and their children’s children’s children came to live in it, maintain it, grow it. The Grand Fishery grew ever larger; the Mistgrove ever more sprawling. Wetland homes for tribes upon tribes of birds, bats and other kinfolk.

A lodge-dam ever re-built. The opposite of war.

The old kinfolk was satisfied with this iteration of his life poem; and he let his labours rest.

***

Summer turned now to autumn, light bleeding from electrum to copper, and a winsome wind brought relief from the heat. Now, the waters of the Grand Fishery shuffled between a transparent calm and a rhythmic variegation. The Woodmother passed from maiden to full mother, and the oak leaves of the oak could be discerned from the glaucous blue-green needles at distance. The serrated quercine leaves of oak shaded into a bounty of fire and gold foliage, and the kindred who were fond of nuts collected the acorns from their cupolas with a diligent, steadfast dedication.

The White Planet - The Seed of the Great Blue – was now a constant in the evening sky. The Earth Planet - The Great Old Badger - shared the heavens with it. The old badger was fond of the planet, if simply out of kinship; and had seen its red spot, looking like his own bulbous nose, through one of the glasses that his Corps had crafted for celestial observations. 

On the night of the autumnal equinox, there was an unexpected knock at his door.

Captain!

It was Captain-Coördinator Alder “Starborn” Kingfisher; the greatest XO and best talking companion an old battle-badger could wish for. The always well put together beaver saluted her commanding officer – both were retired – out of habit. 

Of course, an old friend come for a few final cups of tea. The badger’s chest ached; heavy with the gesture his friend was making.

Starborn had a nose that was shaped like a four pointed star, thus her sobriquet. Her canines, ever active, were stained a vivid orange with the iron of her diet. Though kinfolk, blessed by the Primavera, did not need to eat to live; some still ate in order to keep their body fuelled with the vitamins needed for a healthier life. The Captain was looking thin; and the old girl shared that she was busy looking after her own gaggle of grandchildren – nineteen and counting; and was adding yet another extension to the old place on the water to hold them all.

Starborn was a good sort, a dutiful and industrious. Whilst working, silent and focussed. Whilst cavorting – well, the XO was nothing if not dedicated.

The tea they drank was bitter; and old man and old woman talking of things, high points of lived history most kinfolk would never know. They were among the few left that did know, and betwixt them, they could not forget.

Together they talked of things and deeds gone by. Of the pyrrhic, senseless endeavours of their youth; the youth of the kinfolk themselves. A bloody time. When kin knew not kin and war between mammals and the chiropteran cauldrons raged. That boy, what-was-his-name, the one who was too small for his uniform, but marched proudly and sang the songs of the six groves with a high lilt. That same boy, mashed by the machinery of war, body crushed into the mud underfoot as the fighting encompassed all.

 The terror when the bats filled the sky black; and the fury and the sound when they screeched death from above at the kinfolk spear-tortoise thrust bravely upwards.

The crunching sound of a bat suicide-diver’s body, impaled on a badger-crafted spear-haft.

The boredom. 

That one long-eared assassin, who flapped into their quarters one eve; dark and smelling strange, red eyes full of the promise of death. How they dispatched of him. The shame. The caves they regret excavating. The fleeing swarms of bats whose homes were drowned. The sound of their bodies begin crushed; soft and fleshy under the roar of collapsing limestone. The powder in the air afterwards, the metallic tang to the chalky clouds that left the taste of blood in the back of your throat. The orders they regret taking. They orders they should not have given. 

They spoke until the sun had set and the equinox lay pregnant, the sky purple with ammonitic fluid and the air thick with the musk of the planets rotation around the celestial orrery. The stars emerged and began to wheel ahead, and under a nebula-stained, leaf-shrouded canopy. 

The high beauty of the heavens was of engineering; not of war.

By the glow of eternal bodies; they changed drinks, from the acrid tea to a sweet, filling mead.

Neither ate much these days; and both laughed when they agreed that they thrived on mead.

In the half-light, they talked of forgiveness, of another day of endings and beginnings. When the Great Covenant was reached. When the Great Covenant, against all expectations of kinfolk on both sides, had held; and held long. When the Royal Expeditionary Force found itself without war; and thus without a purpose; and re-formed into the Royal Engineering Corps. When both had eagerly signed up again. When their craft turned from the mechanisation of killing into the mechanisation of the means of life.

Their adulthood, then.

The years it took to build the Newdam. The decade it took to build the Fastmarch. The lifetime it took, was still taking; to grow the Grand Fishery to the vision for what they hoped that it would be. The Six Groves had changed because of them, and moved forward by the engineer’s levelling tool and builder’s shovel, not the warrior’s spear or the general’s battle standard.

Starborn had wielded a shield in their battle days; and her arm was still strong. It now wrapped around her own head, as she lay sleepily on the table. Another story, another laugh or two, the old Captain dozed off, mid sentence.

The dying general pointed his friend in the direction of the guest room; and whilst the Captain-coördinator slept; he returned to his task. Another iteration of the death poem:

At the fulcrum of the season
Contemplation cornucopia
A harvest
A friend
A punctuation
A rotation
Exhausted soil, lying fallow
Ever renews. 

Under a canopy whose shade I shall never sit
These seeds sow
This water flows
This road goes
This light grows 

Under endless stars that shall never, will never know
my name.

 It wasn’t perfect. But it said something real, and with that the general too, slept.

In the late afternoon the next day, dear Alder Kingfisher left. There was an emptiness in his passing, that of a friend loved whom one shall never see again. A little-death. 

The equinox had passed; his last. Each part of the year now, his last.

The old man began to put all his things in their final order. To the right people and places he left his duties and charges. To his family and loved ones he left the possessions of this world and the love of his time here. To the things that remained to him, he gave them their place, their space of honour in the final home he would have.

This took more time than the general had estimated. Before he had finished his remaining labours, the days had grown short, the nights long, the starry skies had become a more frequent companion by moonlight. 

The crisp notes of the snow reminded him of the task that was final.

We are all, one kin.
From one we come; to one we return.
Droplets in spring, creek, river, dam, sea and ocean.
Where now that little droplet?
What difference, this droplet or that? 

All fear, all violence, all rage, all hate
But thunderclap typhoons
Soon heard, soon gone
And in their wake, silence –

 The old kinfolk, first time poet. He left the poem as it lay.

 It left him as he lay.