OWAIN THE RED AT CASTELL DOLBADARN

 

OWAIN THE RED AT CASTELL DOLBADARN, by Nicole Rain Sellers, audio by Karen Bovenmyer, art by Simon Walpole

North Wales, 1275 AD

The infant moon swells full again, relentless, lonely wheel.

Clouds asphyxiate this house swaddled in royal fields.

Spent heather bleeds out honey and flocks surrender wool,

betrayed as I, as powerless in the frigid Gwynedd gale.

 

 

I drag a serpent’s chain up forty feet of spiral stair

to the parapet, to cool my head in moonlit ghosts of air.

My link tail slides through rooms lit dim by leafy arrow-slits.

My ankles, cuffed and callused, scrape the rain-bespeckled slates.

 

 

The river shifts, moon-brazen – now black, now green, now white.

My tower’s a tarnished silver flute skewered by iron spikes.

It rattles heavy rusted locks, and in a blasted thrum

keens nightly for its lack of rightful bard and harp and drum.

 

 

My youth has fed this castle’s stones a feast of twenty summers,

and deathblows dealt by scuffling sons are buried in its tunnels.

As boys, we shook these oaks and set free cruel troops of

swallows,

both bound now: he by treacherous choice, I to this living

gallows.

 

 

I love my faithless brother – oh, but likewise do I hate,

as I crave the sweet blackberries in the hedge outside that gate

and equally I ache to wield their cutting, bloody barb,

while my banner’s faded purple cracks and molders under guard.

 

 

Quiet hands leave kindling, tallow, mutton, turnips, oats.

Whispers fog the stables, waft the courtyard, slip the grates.

My mumbled prayers are lullabies and battle songs of old allies

that go unheard by he on high whose twenty years are but a sigh.

 

 

The moon, cool witness, marks me well,

’til death or justice strikes this bell,

these battlements spew fire, and all

the stones of stolen towers fall.

________________________________________

Nicole Rain Sellers is an Australian writer whose poems and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Plumwood Mountain, Watermark, Crossroads, Silver Cord, The Enchanting  Verses, Three Drops from a Cauldron, and the anthologies Grieve 6, Zodiac Tales, and The Story Hunters. For more about her work, visit her website,

Karen Bovenmyer earned an MFA in Creative Writing: Popular Fiction from the University of Southern Maine. She teaches and mentors students at Iowa State University and Western Technical College. She serves as the Assistant Editor of the Pseuodopod Horror Podcast Magazine. She is the 2016 recipient of the Horror Writers Association Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship. Her poems, short stories and novellas appear in more than 40 publications and her first novel, SWIFT FOR THE SUN, debuted from Dreamspinner Press in 2017.

Simon Walpole has been drawing for as long as he can remember and is fortunate to spend his freetime working as an illustrator. He primarily use pencils, pens and markers and use a bit of digital for tweaking. As well as doing interior illustrations for various publishing formats he has also drawn a lot of maps for novels. his work can be found at his website HandDrawnHeroes.