The Glaistig

We please her at the gloaming by the pond
with a pool of milk in a millstone cradle
not warm at all or scorn-boiled.
Solstice, all seasons, each generation.

We flatten against the standing stone
never knowing how she might appear,
always in her favoured green, plaid wafting in Atlantic surge,
or what her mood might be, grey or blue or gold.

We wait for the wailing or the tricks or her
fixing on our scent. Dragonflies and moths
hover on her heartbeat. Deer dart into the ether,
a distant fiddler strums a jig through the indigo.

*Originally appeared on The Open Mouse / Poetry Scotland, April 2015

Maggie Mackay, a Scot with wanderlust, a love of jazz and a good malt, has been published in All Write Then’s anthology Still Me…(www.pewter-rose-press.com), was the winner of the Writers’ Circle Anthology Award 2014, and has work in various publications, Open Mouse, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Bare Fiction, The Interpreter’s House ,Obsessed with Pipework and The Lake with work forthcoming in The Screech Owl. She is at Manchester Metropolitan University taking an MA in Poetry, and is a co-editor of Word Bohemia (www.wordbohemia.co.uk)