A piece of string?
A royal ribbon?
A hair from the tail
of a horse of Annwn?
A chord from a guitar
or an Annuvian harp?
The slipstream of a comet
or the corpse of a fallen star?
An endless drinking horn?
The horned helmet
of the Bull of Battle?
The horns of the Devil?
Something more sinister?
Yes – indeed – she holds silence.
And, in the silence, she holds a heart –
the heart of the King of Annwn.
Suddenly,
from out of nowhere,
flying at me like a mad dog,
just one tooth at the end of a wooden haft,
the spear that was thrown long ago,
that should have pierced me
before I started running.
It’s finally caught up.
It opens me
and inside I am empty
and hollow as the old yew tree
on which my ragged carcass is hung.
And of course the ravens come.
And of course He’s amongst them –
my God who hung on the yew
in raven form for nine nights
pierced by the same damn spear.
I always knew my turn would come.
And so He comes to sit beside me
and I go to visit Him and we are one –
the tree, the spear, the hung, the void,
the hollowness within and without.
And this moment is within us.
This drawing and poem record a rite I undertook before the Winter Solstice in 2025 – nine days in meditation at the Abyss with my God. Looking back, on the one hand it had worth as a devotional offering, but on the other it wasn’t the healthiest of impulses. It opened a can of worms leading to my recent insights about how my monasticism and asceticism had partly been driven by the unhealthy restrictive and self-destructive impulses that also drove my eating disorder.
They Called Me Pig is a poetry collection charting the development of an eating disorder that began with childhood bullying and how I have begun to heal by building a healthier relationship with food, exercise and my body. I have written it as part of the inner work of my shamanic apprenticeship, as a way of processing trauma and transforming it into art. I’m hoping it’s a topic everybody can relate to on some level as we all have a body and need to eat and exercise to live. You might also have relatives or friends with an eating disorder who might benefit from reading it.
Free PDF HERE.
It is downloadable for free but if you enjoy it please consider reciprocating by passing on the link to a friend or by telling somebody about my writing and shamanic work.
If you’re interested in working with me on using shamanic work combined with art as a method of healing, transformation and self-expression, I offer sessions at £15 an hour. Please get in touch lornasmithers81@gmail.com
I was born from a rose bush
planted by Creiddylad – black, white and red.
My black sister is dead and my white sister is gone.
I wanted to be kind but I could not escape my thorns.
I fled from this world and wrapped myself
around the fortress of Annwn’s King.
I would not let Creiddylad in.
I wanted to be kind but I was cruel.
“It will always be winter here.
He will always wear my crown.
He will never return to gather the dead.
We will sleep together amongst His treasures for ever.”
“I planted you, I nurtured you,” Creiddylad wept,
her tears pouring down around my roots.
“Each one of your petals I made
from a tiny piece of my heart.”
“Then why am I so cruel?”
“Because there is cruelty
hidden deep within my heart –
that is why I practice kindness every day.”
“Then I can be kind too?”
“Yes.”
“Then what must I do?”
“Leave Annwn, leave my King,
return to the world to be a sanctuary
for another, who like you, has been cruel,
but longs to learn to love, to be kind, to heal.”
So I unwrapped my trestles and I threw down my thorns
and prostrated myself at Creiddylad’s feet
in my first act of kindness promising
there will be many more.
There is a black butterfly in Your heart.
I cannot decipher the meaning
on a bright spring morning
when the May flowers blossom
and all the hawthorns are in bloom.
There is a black butterfly in Your heart.
I cannot decipher the meaning
at midday when the sun burns bright
and Maponos strums a song on His harp
with chords of sunlight brighter than the fires of Bel.
There is a black butterfly in Your heart.
I cannot decipher the meaning
at sunset as the blackbirds sing
the sun down and burning happy dancers dance
and talk and do the things that people do.
There is a black butterfly in Your heart.
I cannot decipher the meaning
until midnight comes and I follow
the funeral procession of the sun into darkness.
Until I walk with the dead sun into the depths of the Otherworld.
~
“Dead sun, dead sun, what are we doing here,
what are we doing here in this darkness,
darker than the dark side of the moon,
darker than the dark side of the sun?
“Dead sun, dead sun, what are we doing here,
what are we doing here in this silence,
more silent than the silence
when the King of Annwn died
and Maponos ceased to play His harp?
“Dead sun, dead sun, what are we doing here,
what are we doing here in this stillness
stiller than the places between
the dance-steps of His faery dancers,
the hoofbeats of the horses of His hunt,
the spaces between the beats of His heart?”
“Come deeper, come deeper,” says the dead sun,
“beneath the world’s chatter and words and images
that paint butterfly colours, come deeper, come deeper.”
~
The dead sun takes me to Your tomb in the Castle of Cold Stone.
Reminds me of how Your castle fell from the skies of Annwn,
circling four-cornered, from the songs of the mead-feast,
from the revelry, from the boiling of the cauldron,
from the passing of the mead-cup,
down, down, down,
into the Abyss,
into the place between
the end and the beginning of life and death,
the end and beginning of words and of worlds…
~
You’re dead – there are no words to express my sorrow.
You’re alive, only sleeping, there are no words to express my hope.
You’re dressed in black as if ready to attend Your own funeral.
Your hair is white and silver as the light of the moon
and the hairs in the manes and tails of the horses of Your hunt.
And Your heart, Your heart is red as the reddest
of the roses of Your queen who forever betrays You on May the first.
For You I plant five red roses in Annwn and a single rose above.
~
For you I sit here in the darkness, the silence, the stillness.
I listen to Your breath and the beating of Your heart.
At first it is felt, not heard, not seen.
Then I hear it, then I see it –
the dark flutter of the butterfly in Your heart.
“What is this? What is this?” My heart flutters in concern.
“Why has a black butterfly come to abide
in the heart of the King of Annwn,
the heart of the Otherworld?”
“Worry not.” Even death does not faze You.
You do not speak like a corpse
but like the most living of the living
and the brightest light in Annwn’s darkness.
“You are the black butterfly who flaps her wings in my heart.”
~
“Did You hear that?” I ask the dead sun.
The dead sun has already fled – it is morning.
“Did You hear that?” I ask Maponos.
He has already gone to play His harp.
We’re alone now, my King and I, butterfly and heart,
in the darkness, in the silence, in the solitude,
for a moment before the world’s call forces us to part.
I created this painting at a Beltane focused seasonal creative workshop with Two Birds Therapy and wrote the poem afterwards. It’s based on the dichotomy I always feel at this time of year between the beauty and energy of nature and the sadness of Gwyn’s death and my need to be alone with Him whilst others are celebrating. The black butterfly was the result of a mistake wherein I tried to make Gwyn’s heart redder but instead smudged black into it. For me this gave the piece its meaning.
We are blue and not red.
We sing of times a’ringing.
Of the living and the dead.
Of the death of the Fairy King.
We are blue and not red.
We ring of times a’singing.
Of the Fairy King’s death.
Behold the coming of May!
We sing from blood so red
the song of Summer’s kingdom.
The Fairy Queen in bloom.
The King of Annwn in His tomb.
We sing from skies so blue
the song of Annwn’s sorrows.
Our king is dead so summer comes
yet He’ll be back tomorrow.
If I had a thousand words
to describe the King of Annwn’s cheekbones
I would say they were like icebergs,
like the hulls of the ships that crash into them and sink,
like the angles of the limbs of the dead men who float to the surface,
like the way He lays out the dead in the icy caverns where the ice dragon
roams with a single icy jewel hidden deep within his forehead.
I would say they are like the way He says
the letter ‘A’, the capital, with the triangular tip,
as if it is not the beginning but the end of the alphabet.
I would say they are like the broken glass
of shattered coffins in my good dreams and not the bad.
I would say they are the antithesis of polar bears and the peak of antinomy.
I would say that I have seen many a skier slide down them to death.
I would say they are like runways and the paths of aircraft
and the flightpaths of starships,
the souls trampling
across them to the otherworld.
I would say they are like the travels of swans and geese.
I would say they are like the strobe lights that shine down
from the helicopters that fly over my house at night,
sometimes hunting for the criminals
as He is always hunting
for the dead.
I would say
they are like the spotlight
in which I stood, dancing, seeking to win His favour.
I would say they are like His anger, like His fury, like His lament,
that they were bent with a hammer in a forge that was
neither hot nor cold nor even burning.
I would say they are his secret.
I would say everybody knows but keeps quiet.
I would say they are like the divine madness that unfolds
itself within His followers in their shapeshifting,
folding, unfolding, spreading wings.
I would say they are bone-light
but heavy in my hands.
I would say
they are like the precipice
I walked on so narrowly between life and death,
so very thin and dangerous on both sides a fall into the abyss.
I would say they were the answer to my prayer after a long dark night
of soul searching, the first slants of the appearance
of a face in the darkness,
the first strokes
of a name written on my soul.
I would say they were the remedy
to the poison within me, the pharmakon, the paradox.
I would say they were the pride that summoned me from shame.
I would say they were the answer to my cry for help.
I would say they will help old men
and feeble infants regain
their dignity again.
I would say
they will once more
be serpents and dragons
with wings bent at cheek-bone-like angles.
I would say I have spoken only half the words
and will speak the other half
to him alone
in death.
and polished all his statues
I fell into his smile
and I smiled too
and all the world smiled
and all the universe smiled
and all the people of Annwn.
I can’t rememer how long ago
I forgot how to smile
but here it is –
this sign upon my lips,
not just for me but for you
the Wise Lad’s gift.
When I drew this image it was supposed to represent the unburying of a multitude of meditating Wise Lad statues being unburied from the earth from where they’d lain for eons. On completing it I realised that looked at from another perspective they appear to be hovering over drop down toilets! One of His jokes I think!
I.
No-one knows
the time or date of his coming
because he slipped like mist into the world
between times, between places –
a boy here, a boy there,
a boy everywhere
on every one of his foreheads a shining jewel.
II.
Some say
he came as a star
or in a shining starship
others that he came on turtleback
or was spat out like a prophet by a whale,
others that he crawled from the Abyss,
the darkest pit, the deepest well.
The crows of course claim
they brought him
on a dark moon
like the blackest of storks.
III.
What wisdom did he bring?
Not the knowledge of Uidianos
and his knowing ones and the Court of Don.
No his wisdom was even deeper than Annwn.
It’s told he buried it here to keep it safe like a bomb.
Here, there, everywhere, in all times and places,
in every one of us and so it waits until
he comes to awaken it.
IV.
So he came
to me, here in Penwortham,
jewel shining like a star in the dark
and took up residence
in my heart.
These two poems were written in response to the Mother House module on Sylvia Lindsteadt’s ‘When Women Were the Land‘ course for Advaya. Lindsteadt’s conception of the Mother House is rooted in Neolithic matrilineal and matrilocal cultures wherein husbands marry into the Mother House rather than women leaving and entering their husband’s house. She also notes the role of the Mother House in monastic traditions. Lindsteadt reads the Greek myth of the abduction of Persephone by Hades as one of Her being taken from Her mother, Demeter’s, house. When I returned to our northern British pre-Christian myth of Creiddylad’s abduction by Gwyn ap Nudd, which shares many parallels, the lines about Creiddylad being shut up in Her father’s house led me to suspect this may be a Mother House story too.
Taken From My Mother’s House
‘Creiddylad daughter of Lludd Llaw Eraint went off with Gwythyr son of Greidol, but before he could sleep with her Gwyn son of Nudd came to take her by force. Gwythyr son of Greidol gathered a host and Gwyn triumphed… Arthur heard of this and came to the North, and summoned Gwyn son of Nudd to him, and released his noblemen from his prison, and made peace between Gwyn son of Nudd and Gwythyr son of Greidol. This is the agreement that was made: the maiden was to be left in her father’s house, untouched by either party, and there was to be battle between Gwyn and Gwythyr every May Day forever from that day until Judgement Day, and the one that triumphed on Judgement Day would take the maiden.’
~ Culhwch and Olwen
I was taken from my mother’s house then locked up in my father’s house
so the men like to tell the story. Let me tell you another tale. Of how I was not picking but making flowers, as I made love – styles, stigmas, anthers, stamens, parts that stick to each other and fit together perfectly.
So I chose to go off with Gwythyr son of Greidol and to go with my brother, Gwyn son of Nudd, to Annwn, to his land of bones to make flowers and love.
Messy the battle, the roses white and red, some say King Arthur ended it. They’re wrong – it was me – it was me and my flowers that brought peace.
And I still live here in my mother’s house with all my flowers and earthly greenery twining my head and limbs and choose to go with my otherworld husband when his hounds call and the trees beg to leave their leaves.
As for my father’s house deep in the sea there are no doors or locks.
As for Judgement Day there are no ends or beginnings in the endless love story between my mother’s house, this earth, or my brother’s house, deep Annwn.
Between the two pass the spirits of the mothers and the fathers, of the sisters and the brothers, no Arthurs are needed to broker the deals between.
Not Taken From My Mother House
They were taken from their mother house
time and time again –
surnames erased,
Collison, Allen, Curtis…
But what were these names
attached at the end as they married off
and entered the houses of their husband’s fathers?
My surname has never fitted easily with me
and neither has my mother’s received
from a husband ab hominem.
Perhaps that’s why I have
shrugged them off with my nunnery.
Whatever would my ancestors think
if they knew I had married a God
who did not take me away to the Otherworld
but came instead to dwell here in my Mother House –
here, on my altar, in this sanctuary, in my heart, in my blood?
Here in my mother house where I would keep the skulls
of my mothers and their holy relics if I had them
but instead we keep my great grandmother’s
chest of drawers, cribbage board,
gnarly old desk, cutlery…
I am building shrines to my mothers
and hoping they will understand the changes –
why I married a God who will let our names and spirits flow
into the Otherworld and back again more fluently than any river.
I stand here, now, in my Mother House, timeless, eternal,
knowing I will not last forever or be erased.