FOR A TASTE OF JUNIPER by Isaac E.

FOR A TASTE OF JUNIPER
by: Isaac E.

One weekend walking at the park

I passed a cedar tree

whose whitely hanging berries shined

and seemed to call to me.

“A Juniper!” The melody

of the name rang through my mind;

I plucked it from the nettle branch

and ate it with the rind.

Between my teeth the seed released

the essence of a pine.

A little thing so picturesque

was certainly Divine.

“Our ancestors,” I mused and took

the bridge across the stream

“lived on Nature’s hospitality

in a prehistoric dream.”

Ahead the sidewalk took a turn

around an ancient tree,

an oak whose age, if I’d to guess,

approached a century,

and in the hollow of the trunk,

enringed by spotted shrooms,

stood gnome and fairy statuettes

in small ceramic rooms.

I stopped and wondered at the sight

and who had set them there

to gather coins, and charms, and things

each passerby could spare.

In the shadow of a “Welcome” sign,

in a red cap with a bell,

a gnome lay in the autumn leaves,

as though he’d slipped and fell.

I set him back upon his feet

beside his fairy wife

and noticed, hanging from his belt

in a sheath: his hunting knife.

Redoubling my former pace,

I continued on my way

without a second thought of gnomes

or fruit and spent the day.

That night, exhausted from my walk,

I quickly fell asleep

and sank beneath the realm of dreams

to a weirder, wider deep.

Paralyzed upon my bed,

a bell rang me awake:

a jingling, tingling, jangling chime

like glass about to break.

There in my open window blurred

the fringes of a form.

The air was charged electrically

like the prelude to a storm.

Colors filled the shadow’s frame:

two bright blue beady eyes,

a snowy beard and a crimson cap.

A spell suppressed my cries.

I lay with nothing left to me

but to shudder in the leer

of a living, squinting, looming gnome

before me crystal clear!

In the eerie gleam of a cloudless moon

shined the silver of a blade.

Descending from the sill he said,

“You’re right to be afraid!”

“And yet for your forgetfulness

of the fair folk of the fay,

and the ancient law of the sacred wood

you’ll live another day,”

“but if again you trespass

and taste my Cedar fruit

without an equal offering,

you’ll pay in blood for loot!”

At last I broke the bonds of sleep

in a cold sweat, with a scream

and knew I’d not again forget,

in the wake of such a dream,

the ancient law of the sacred wood

of the gnomes and fairy folk

or to leave a penny in the hollow

of their ancient oak.