Earth Energies

Fire-serpents weave across the land:
We carve cupmarks into standing stones
To amplify their power,
And the force penetrates in waves,
Shoves trees and plants upward,
Pulses in animals’ veins,
Spirals everywhere.

I walk through lightning,
Through electricity and geomagnetism,
Transmitting and receiving.
Excitotoxins flare in the brain:
My hairs rise, lips and toes tingle,
I see, smell, touch, taste and hear like a god,
Magnetosomes dance in my brain,
Thymus, lungs, spleen, liver and ethmoid sinus,
And in the haem;
The pineal, the hypothalamus,
Ammon’s Horn in the hippocampus,
The limbic system
All vibrate.

I dowse and witch across the land
With drakes and pucks,
And mark the barrows over hidden springs where cattle gather,
Hares make their forms and blackcocks court
And, in caves, I hear all the sounds from around,
Concentrated into eldritch music…
And, out of a hissing moaning well, rises a pillar of light.
See, a huge circle of blackbirds sit,
All facing inward to the centre,
Where another bird holds court;
And sheep all circle a field together,
Slowly, in unison, driven by the same urge.

Aquifers glow electric under Wessex chalk,
And geodetic stress lines shift
In sympathy with the tectonic earth,
Evoking holy fire.
Overnight, like music, the mandalas appear,
In fields of wheat, corn, oats and rape,
Among sunflowers or potates, snow, ice or sand,
Soul-code, elegant and precise,
Pictograms, fractals and stellar configurations
Sudden and ancestral as hill figures and stone circles,
Traced by sacred geometry.
A shimmering shrieking whirlwind like a mist
Appears over a cornfield,
And a spiral forms suddenly, growing outwards from the centre.
Inside the circle, healing powers lay hands
Upon you, lift you off the ground,
Staring into wonder and enchantment
As weird sounds sway you,
Out of body, out of time;
Else, madness takes you by the throat
And evil spirits play havoc,
Revelling in dread and desperation
As horrible memories turn you inside-out
And panicked birds swoon away.
Deep resonances hold you:
The heated glands alchemize,
Energy pours out of the head and hands,
You cannot think, cannot sleep, cannot function,
But perhaps this is the invisible door
Through which the watchful earth is urging you
To pass into the Otherworld.