In those days, wolves still walked the hills, and the spaces between trees were alive with calls
that echoed across the moorlands and sank into the already chilled bones of the shepherds,
drawing the chill to place hearthfire flames can’t warm.
.
In those days, we were still wild.
The hills were all fever and fable,
the heathers still heavy with magic.
.
Smoke hangs sweet on the skin when it’s laced
With burnt incense and offerings, and sleep comes deep with dreams where the peat fire burns.
.
That was the way of it:
Smoke and song, fever and fable, woodlands and wolf-song.
.
Green witch of the bog,
Moving softly through the river.
.
I want to know where the wolves have gone.
.
Where are the wolves who prowled the hills,
Fearsome as the spirit who claimed the land?
.
Where are the wolves who howled their songs,
calling all eyes to the moon?
.
The land still whispers wolf-fables, and the river hums with magic of the past, still close enough to see when the seasons are high and your eyes are clear.
.
Those who listen carefully when they walk across the moors leave with a tingling on their skin,
humming something wild
heard on the wind.
.
They carry the wild back into their towns.
They carry the past that isn’t so far away,
and the magic of wild places that wells under the earth,
in that pulling place where it slumbers when it goes long uncalled.
.
For so long now the wolves have been gone from this place, where the air arches with the absence of their songs.
.
As evening falls, I make my way back toward the cottage,
Something wild is tossing on the wind,
the chill of it reaches my bones.
.
In the distance,
I hear howling.
.
Alexa Brockamp Hoggatt
Alexa is a poet and writer you can follow on Instagram @alexa.hoggatt or linktr.ee/AHoggatt
She is currently listening to the audiobook ‘Druidcraft’ by Philip Carr-Gomm
.