For the summer I’m going back to the series of pieces mythologizing my growing up in Cape Breton.
The Violet Moon
see how the full moon
is wrapped by red cloud
in our village
we call that the Violet Moon
this the one night
when the one beast
which the Denizen fears
walks the earth
a shape shifter
that usually lives as human
as you or I
humans who forget
what rests coiled inside
till the violet moon appears
to nudge a latent beast to wakefulness
none who have this curse
can resist its call
can remember what has happened
those who have met the beast
have been struck dumb
speechless with fear
I mean the weremoose
don’t laugh
because your derision is the one thing
that can invite it to occupy your body
you will awake
feeling cold breath shivering
your feet your hands
toes will start to point
fingers will become stiff
your bones will crack
your neck will thicken
you will scream as your hips rent apart
backbone snapped reshaped
each moment of the change
is an agony
any who hear will fear
your family will hide
but you will hunt them down
there is no escape the weremoose
you can recognize one
if you have time
because the antlers seem slightly askew
like the roof of a house not quite right
or the colour of the fur
that never stays the same brown
when you try to focus on it
a mist of violet hue
flows behind it
scarring any tree that it caresses
the cloven hooves
can crush skulls
the jagged teeth
can rip a throat in one bite
the same teeth
can crack a man’s ribs
to pull out your heart
and eat it
while the last of your blood
spurts through your veins
you are alive
long enough to see your own blood
oozing from the satisfied maw
of the weremoose
This is a ‘new’ village piece thatI wrote specifically for Camp Pinebow. It harkens back to Moose-mare https://wp.me/p1RtxU-1Vv as I extend moose myth into a darker territory – this one even more cinematic. Moose-mare echoed Jacob wrestling the with angel – here we get sense that perhaps many men of the village have a beast within them that is affected by the moon – which is were according village legends the moose came from.
The piece clearly uses werewolf legend as well. One is powerless to stop the transformation or even it initiate it. I also call on that horror trope that disbelief invariably turns the scoffer into the next victim. I enjoy the description of the change. I was probably thinking of Seth Green as Oz on Buffy during his werewolf changes – though he looked like & moved more like an orangutang with a wolf’s head than a wolf.
I dwell on how the weremoose kills because this was originally meant as a scary campfire story. Those stories call for a certain amount of visceral gore to make them effective. Do moose have cloven hooves? I’m not sure but we do know who the Cloven One is, right 🙂
Some of details are invented – the acidic mist that scars tree bark is my own addition to the cannon. Violet comes up a few times as the host of the show where I first performed this was Lizzie Violet – it never hurts to pay tribute to your host in a way that isn’t too overt. Violet is also a nice change for the colourless mists that appear in horror most of time. They are either murky blacks or, for some reason, lime green.
Hey! Now you can give me $$$ to defray blog fees & buy coffee in Washington at 2018’s capfireslam.org – sweet,eh? paypal.me/TOpoet