The Gopher and the Hawk

Written for Ferða-maðr, the tree that walks and sometimes talks, though only when the wind leans in close.

There once was a gopher who lived beneath a golden field,
His world was dark and safe and small, shaped only by what he could feel.

He tunneled through roots, slept beneath thunder,
And wondered what stirred the earth’s ceiling with thunder.

One day, a fieldmouse came tumbling down —
Wild-eyed, breathless, her whiskers ash-brown.

“A god nearly took me!” she gasped, half insane.
“Wings like curtains! Eyes like flame!”

The gopher, quite sensibly, blinked once or twice.
“Did it speak?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“Did it smite?”
“No…”
“Then perhaps it was just the wind, or a shadow passing right.”

She fled again, too shaken to argue.
And the gopher returned to digging —
Because doubt makes better burrows than wonder.

Yet he couldn’t stop thinking of wings in the sky,
So once, just once, he dared to climb high.

He poked his head from the warm, wombed ground
And beheld a world too wide to be sound.

Grass taller than myths,
Clouds shaped like beasts,
And above them all,
A shadow with talons that hunted the least.

He stared at the hawk —
And the hawk stared back.

For a moment, nothing.
For a moment, the world held its breath.

And then the gopher whispered,
“I believe.”

He was gone before the whisper left his lips.

Some say the hawk is a god.
Some say it’s just hunger in feathered form.

But the gopher’s tunnels still twist through the earth,
And somewhere in the deepest dark, his tale is told:

“There are things you’ll never understand.
But that doesn’t mean they’re not looking down.”

Penned by the hand of
Skari Vardr,
Witness of Shadows, Dreamer of Flight,
Who has walked with god-born killers and wept with half-buried kings,
Bearer of Sannlín, the True Thread
Knower of Things Best Left Unproven,
The Watcher of Veiled Memories,
Seeker of the Truth Behind the Tale,
and Poet of Pillow and Blade