FJALKONAN
Aurora crown
The long dark night
As winter be
The lands fall white
Raise thy sword
Smite the ice
Free the fjords
A Falcon's Knight
So puffins nest
And ravens soar
Peace be best
Prepare for war
Oh Fjallkonan
There is not one
As fierce as fair
In tale or song
Icelandic
... Fjallkonan ("The Lady of the Mountain")
... Is phonetically pronounced as FYATL-ko-nan
... Iceland honors individuals with knighthoods
through its sole order of chivalry, the Order of the Falcon.
mythology’s Celtic complications
Viking helmet with bullhorns
powerful elixir
Some days we mortals have it, others we won’t
~ Immortals don’t care if they do or they don’t
We live
on the edge
between fact
and uncertainty
The ground
at our feet
always changing
with time
The crack
ever widens
in theory
and myth
Rewriting
our history
in memory
— unrhymed
(Dreamsleep: September, 2026)
Before the city grew teeth of storeys,
Every road was once a footpath of dark earth,
Every skyline a village dream feigning height.
The whirlwind arrives like an ancestral drum,
Beating zinc roofs into memory,
While the soil drinks without question.
Maize rises like angry dust,
Crops sleep beneath the earth like buried wealth,
The old iroko keeps census of generations.
We call ourselves urban, as if asphalt
Could bleach the village from our blood,
As if language could divorce us from reality.
Every man carries an ancestral footpath,
Every woman a forgotten rib in the bones,
Every last name is a door to somewhere rural.
The city is only a village that learnt to disguise itself,
And civilisation, perhaps, is merely distance,
From the stream that first taught us to swim.
When the rain smells of the earth,
Listen keenly—the village speaks through you;
Everyone is a village man, even in hired suits.
From Vandeikya to Eko sluthers the same rhythm,
Only the midriff of imagination pats on them.
Mythical gods lived on Mount Olympus,
but the one true God lives on Mount Zion.
They were erratic and capricious.
The true God is constant and unchanging.
Zeus was the chief among the other gods,
But the true God is the only God.
The gods were said to be immortal,
Yet only the true God is immortal.
Poseidon, Dionysus, Hephaestus,
Aphrodite, Apollo, Artemis
were all gods that had a beginning
But the true God has no beginning.
Among the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
Perfect unity and harmony reigns,
But the mythical gods of Olympus,
were always fighting among themselves.
Mythical gods were figments of man’s mind,
The true God created man with a mind.
He is the God who created all things.
God Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient.
If within your soul, you feel a vacuum
which none of your possessions have filled
Seek out the true God who created you
and made the space that only he can fill.
Big ghosts have small ghosts
in their dreams to haunt ‘em,
Small ghosts have smaller ghosts
and so-on ad infinitum
We spent the summer of '99 waiting for the sky to break.
The old seer had promised us a king—
not of crowns or gold, but of sheer terror,
dropping from the heavy heat of July.
People pulled what they needed from the ink.
Some swore it was the third beast waking up,
a fundamentalist storm ready to swallow the map,
while others just saw the familiar rot of politics
finally bursting into a global fire.
Either way, the dread sold a lot of paperbacks.
The prophecy became a ghost in the movie theaters,
a blockbuster specter we could safely watch
while pretending the end of the world was just entertainment.
The world didn't end, but the earth keeps shaking.
With every new war on the evening news,
every disaster that leaves a city in the dark,
somebody always dusts off the quatrains again.
We tell ourselves it's just a myth,
until the horizon bruises,
and we catch ourselves looking up.
All the dishes fell down broken
Favorite cups, you won’t believe
Smashed to bits, but it’s unspoken
Myths don’t mention human grief
They don’t want us to come close
Private troubles doesn’t count
If you ask, nobody knows
What was their crime about
The collective guilt is fake
There is no such thing on earth
Otherwise we’re God’s mistake
From the accident of birth
Trevelyan, a sole survivor
Is the one we should remember
See the picture of white rider
On eleventh of November
Of one thousand ninety nine
He escaped the great excess
Of the punishment, confined
To the Land of Lyonesse
Then the plot disintergrates
To the pieces that don’t fit
Well together, so it fades
To the dishes crashed in bits..
I don't remember falling asleep,
but I remember waking up,
With a white streak in my hair,
and my health all back up.
I don't remember falling asleep,
but I remember waking up,
The world around me changed,
as I empty another cup.
I was told my life had ended,
I was pronounced deceased,
One day I was a God,
The next, my power ceased.
I was told my life had ended,
I was pronounced deceased,
News told nationwide,
from the children to the priest.
For a cold tyrant locked in his tower,
the name and legends told were what gave me power.
Only out on a balcony for social festivities,
I stayed out to give a speech but retreated within the hour.
For a cold tyrant locked in his tower,
the name and legends told were what gave me power,
It used to be a mention of me,
The mere word that made men cower.
I see them happily singing,
drinking from flowing cup,
Someone tell my subjects that the king has woken up.
From lies in books they set us free
Encyclopedias are redacted
And Satie’s fourth Gymnopedie
Flooded with likes from the attracted
I’m living in the brave new world
It works far freakier than Huxley’s
I’m bought and sold and I download
I get the codes to use them aptly
I’m quite a modern chap these days
No more a fossil left in lurch
Daedalus AI builds new maze
Keeps every Theseus in search
Where is that famous silver thread?
But I just passed the exit gate
I heard the Minotaur is dead
The ambulance arrived too late..
Dragon
The mystical dragon pictured in today’s print and movies never existed.
Many mystical creatures are based on exaggerations of a creature that did exist.
Possibly, a medium sized tree lizard with the ability to jump from tree to tree in search of food.
It had very strong stomach acids laced with biological silicone gas. The gas slowly rose from tubes to fill pouches on both sides of its mouth.
When confronted by a predator, it hissed releasing the silicone gas toward the predator.
The gas was self-igniting in air, and the flames burned the predator.
Over centuries, seeing fire in very tall trees and telling and retelling of the story with additions,
Give us descriptions of the mythical Dragon we see today.
A large flying reptile with wings and the ability to release huge flames at will.
ARE WE JUST GOING IN CIRCLES ?
Unless influenced by change.
A path to face a case of spirals in space.
I'd been laid low. I'd been let down.
I came to this blue lagoon to drown
and settle into the silt -
when the calliopean lilt
of a nymph in diaphanous gown -
a heavenly harbinger of hope,
an effervescent means to cope,
with a tune, so sweetly humming,
revealed a means of becoming -
might my muse and me, elope?
I vaticinate through cypress
prognosticator of folklore
brewing indwelling woodcraft
dasyure and platypus
our unvalued birthright
gnaw at cassiterite
sunburn on cycadophyta
an acherontic turmoil
you , ceres
lent nonlexical rhyme
reform this crisis !
always
evermore
peaceably
(Weekly Magnetic Poetry Challenge • August 17–23, 2026)
Myth Categories
Definition | What is Myth in Poetry?
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Related Poetry Forms
mythology, fairy tale, fable, tale, allegory, parable, superstition, saga, tall tale, lore,