Robin Hood (#1), Elena Childress (September 2026)

Robin Hood (#1)

Sing, Mary, our lady of lilies and lays, of Robin
whose arrows sang clean from Norse neck to Norse
neck, who beat his plow to a blood-tinged blade
and with it splintered spines and severed souls
until he laid it to its rest, sunk deep in English dirt.
So sing, lady who wept beneath the three rude trees.
 
Now among the vast-trunked Wessex trees,
laying in leaves and shielded with shade, Robin
waits, his mind stained with vengeance, and the dirt
beneath him damp with the blood of slaughtered Norse
and Englishmen alike—Alfred’s men’s unshriven souls
mottled with the icy Danes who lived by their blades
 
and died. The Norse serpent ships cut like blades
through the whale road. Their axes cut the English trees
like a scythe through water. They hoarded Christian souls—
souls and altar dressings were their loot, and Robin’s 
kinsmen, hall, and hope all fell to ash beneath the Norse
raiders’ greed. Robin returned from hunting, but dirt
 
was all they left, so now a shallow grave in ravaged dirt
is all that Robin leaves when he hunts them. Blades
cannot cross arrows, nor can iron and steel in Norse
fists slay what they cannot see nestled in the green trees’
arms. So sing, gentle mother, of the lost child Robin,
who first followed Nemesis, false balancer of souls,
 
before he turned to grace. Sing of his soul
so hunted and haunted that, whether dreaming on dirt
or in a bed, the spirits of slain kinsmen stole Robin’s
rest. A silver stag with antlers like blanched blades
pursued his tired heart through stands of trees
and down into deep water, where the Norse

hoard stood, the bank’s mud around their Norse
boots slick and sucking, blood in the muck, the souls
just severed still heavy among the branches of trees.

Trees whose tender, twining roots were young in the dirt
when the Romans brought their buildings and their blades. 
This was the scarred and scavenged homeland of Robin.
 
So he plots the day he’ll lay the Norsemen in the dirt.
He’ll break their blades, and his kinsmen’s souls will rest.
Robin plots the path in the trees, the path of the prey he’ll hunt.