An homage the dark beauty of Glomdoring,
set to three different rhythms.

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Song of Glomdoring
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Upon the Drums, the viscid shadows crawl.
Glancing taut skins with immaterial wings,
The squirming mass of insubstantial things
Elicits echoes to bewilder and appall.

The muted rhythms weave a mystic pall:
A dusk suffused with eerie whisperings
Of twisted boughs in solemn clearings,
In counterpoint to Crow's ferocious squall.

Those passing through the forest of the fall
Quicken their step, compelled by gloomy stirrings,
Subdued again in sight of the wood's eaves.

The blessed few who know Glomdoring's lull
For beauty, hear the darkness as it sings,
And dance, impassioned, midst the rotting leaves.

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Nocturne
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Dusk falls. In Her arms, Mother Night
swathes Her faithful in shadow.
From chill gloom aloft on black wing
the murder, the carriers of blight
blot the sky. The children of Crow
in shrill, raucous caw start to sing

the song of the hunter. They sing
of quarry obscured in the night,
betrayed to the eyes of the crow,
the talons swooping from shadow
rending the prey. Merciless blight
descends from the sky on black wing -

dark forms in the dark, ink on ink, wing
down from high perch. Barghests sing,
funereal howls that blight
those who hear. The fabric of night
chokes the air, thickening shadow
lashes each limb. Only a crow

can cut through the murk: carrion crow
soars free from all bonds on fleet wing,
leaving no trace but a shadow
over the trees. Serrated leaves sing,
an eerie refrain through the night -
the forest once ravaged by blight

now Wyrd glory, thriving on blight:
sown from the gifts of Great Crow,
ravenwoods fed on woe and on night
twine with thorned vine, stir with black wing.
For the beauty of Glomdoring
we sing, voices rising from shadow.

On the Drums, a shadow of crow
strikes the pulse of the night with its wing,
stirs the Heart of Darkness to sing.

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Lull
----

Fathomless Night swathes in shadows
the quiescent forest. A scream
cuts through the dark. Tenebrous boughs
like silhouettes wrought from a dream
stifle the sounds of perishing prey.
Blighted leaves rain down on the stream
eddy then sink in riverside clay,
mulch rotting to form fecund soil
where ravenwoods thrive on decay
Thornlashes writhe, cruel briars coil
athwart gloomy paths to subdue
the foreigners come to despoil
the merciless woods. A tattoo -
a rhythm, a maddening refrain -
from the Drums of the Dead echoes through
Wyrden beauty - the holy domain
whispers in thrall, "Viravain."

And the forest feigning repose
explodes with the wingbeats of crows.