Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth

In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.

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The Clay Ladies in Winter

Now they stand knee-deep in the good, tilled earth of our gardens and fields, bestowing their gift of fruitfulness, as they have since the end of the last Great Ice.

 

Call them the Clay Ladies.

 

But come winter, what then?

 

To ask is to know.

 

Of course the Mothers do not stand in the fields all winter long, buried in snow.

 

Rather, they lie asleep in the jars, the bins, the cellars where we store the foods that will keep us through the cold, the seeds that we will sow next year.

 

And then in the spring they rise again, to do their work of wonder.

 

And at the end, as archaeologists find, we lay them down with our dead.

 

For will the Clay Ladies not rise again?

 

And are the dead not seeds?

 

Sculpture: Joanna Hajduk, Glinka Design

Photo: Magda Kielar

 

 

 

 

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Poet, scholar and storyteller Steven Posch was raised in the hardwood forests of western Pennsylvania by white-tailed deer. (That's the story, anyway.) He emigrated to Paganistan in 1979 and by sheer dint of personality has become one of Lake Country's foremost men-in-black. He is current keeper of the Minnesota Ooser.

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