The Witness
They are overshadowed by that evergreen giant,
the one thousand year witness to ceremonies,
to burials, and namings.
Coal was once hoarded where the hollowing
of the yew meets the earth. There, inside God’s tree,
they find a held shelter,
but the air is reduced, taxine within the yew’s
five propped branches, he is hallucinating
as he tastes her,
that passed mead of love, now drugged by her.
Add Odin’s ability to bind and unbind,
and a two millennia lie,
he has no defences left, hung, and crucified
by the centre of her which wets his fingers
in the yew’s compression.