Something Wicked This Way Comes

Exurban streets run rictus with manifestations
Etymology meets Cosmology metes the red brick road
Everything leads down Morrígan's ruby-wrought path
Enter and light the first pyre, soon illumed thirty more
Exhalation knocks on sovereign doors of raven war
Eburnean hand of prophecy, can you feel it?

Hallowed as she comes, Morrígan fetes fate for eyes
Hecatomb pairs, visionary ones, see the shoots rise
Heaven abandoned Hell as every garden row grows
Her lavish Eden anew on earth, it's evil ecstasy
Hierophant footprints tread toward the eve of Eves
Hogarthian, your ego of a king, lest she crowns it

Long, lonely, lullaby subcultures court suburbia
Lashing rain subdues modernity with mystagogues
Lethean so, soak in pleasure and pain, or sink
Leucine like the rest of them, nor proving due worth?
Lycanthropic spoils earned with sword and shield
Let go, swallow the sibylline screams

Samhain centers creationists loyal to October's rank
Suffrage of predestined damned, dwelling primacy
Soldiering from that primogeniture marsh
She of hyaline pursuit makes her mark in every town
Syzygy séances claw-raise the fucking dead
Sentient moons in Morrígan's sky, clasp her fingers

Windfall wraiths stalk eleventh-hour cusps of night
Witching season, nigh for her deafening rebellion
Whorl scrawls of 31 atop populated pentices of price
Widdershins rewound unbound astound time...NOW
Wander through such wonder as her wunderkind
Where the windburned walk is your final destination

(c) Edward Swafford 2026.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Samhain differs from Halloween; it originates from Irish folklore, and is a darker festival held on October 31st to celebrate the cyclical beginning of the end.

Death and rebirth feature heavily.

The titular character in my poem, Morrígan, is also known as "The Morrígan" because ancient Celtic texts complicate and re-tell versions of her true identity/nature/representation.

In a brief published text from University College Cork, she's referenced as a woman planting seeds of war in a mythological pagan conflict called The Second Battle of Mag Tuired.

Broadly speaking, she's a deity of destruction, divination, reincarnation, prophecies, and the realms between life and death. In my poem, she embodies Samhain just as much as the small-town setting.

You, dear reader, are her guest of ghoulish honor...

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