The Nine Realms
9 months, 23 poets and writers, 22 Artists, 3 composers, 1 Viking boat: a magical reworking of Norse Mythology for contemporary audiences
Poems and Writing inspired by the Norse realm of Helheim (The Realm through which men must pass to reach Nifelheim)
Featuring:
Lenka Monk, Ross Beattie, Joanna Lee &
Lydia Allison
All angels go to hell
By Lenka Monk
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The gates open.
The beast’s blood dripping muzzle welcomes me.
On my sin flavoured bones the creature can feast,
Along with an offer of my blackened soul.
Who’s the judge and condemns me to this place?
Who writes the rules and decides what is right and what is wrong?
The brave warriors kill their enemy in their thousands and yet they are sitting up in Valhalla, drinking wine for eternity.
Never mind the innocent they slaughtered and called it collateral damage in the name of their Gods.
What God justify killing?!
I have not hurt anyone I have not taken a life.
I only loved.
Maybe wrongly by their standards, but still only loved.
In spite of this terrible place and the suffering, in my mind there’s no doubt.
I would do it all over again, without question, without so much as miniscule pause.
I have lived my life by my rules, not by their misguided sense of righteousness.
So come! Tear at my flesh, tear at my heart, tear at everything that you
find so awfully disgusting about me!
And I shall laugh, for there’s nothing that you can take from me anymore.
I left all that mattered, all that was good and pure somewhere else.
Somewhere you cannot touch.
Somewhere immortal.
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My Helheim
by Ross Beattie
When will the wolf swallow the sun ?
I’m strung out again with another deadline tapping at the shade covered windows.
Prompts and papers submerge the fragility of the only realm I really know.
I’m trapped here.
Waiting for the night.
Hoping for help to cross the hills with the arrival of darkness.
But as I wait, the shades will stay tightly drawn.
The wolf’s scream pierces through my every half attempt to care, as I hide in the isolation.
I can no longer leave, and nothing inside me desires to free.
I watch the cracks below the door for the gentle flow of blood.
As only then will I be safe from these endless winters and the shadow of the trembling tree might stop plaguing my mind.
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mist
by Lydia Allison
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in the place of misery
of those who died happy. those who felt
the soft lover press on their last breath.
the crawling surface of gjoll
resembles rainfall
the way water seems
to reach up
to break from the moving weight. straining
to join the clearing air.
here. at the end of all
is the source of the wind
that changes life to fire and skeletons and ash.
sighs through the sweeping
changing wall of fog.
the breeze carries to the graves of grey souls
and hits on the doors of the living
like cold palms. like
the desperate man who only wants
to come home.
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The sybil’s lyric
by Joanna Lee
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We have lingered far too long
in the land of these dead, buried
beneath roots of returning sadness,
longing for a new start, fair and green,
for that which is hidden
to disappear in the rivermud of April,
for autumn to be born again.
The despair grows quiet and hungry
and damp, so down and to the north
beside a bend in the river of knives,
under a blue back-lit moon I weigh my heart
and lay myself to wait for the end of days
when the watchman of the giants
hunches to tune his harp.
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Find out more about Lenka, Ross and Lydia here:
Lenka Monk
Contact ArtiPeeps
Ross Beattie
https://twitter.com/blackpoemblues
Lydia Allison
https://twitter.com/LydiaAllison13
Joanna Lee
the-tenth-muse.com
https://twitter.com/la_poetessa
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As always, thank you for your interest.
The Nine Realms Indiegogo Campaign:
http://igg.me/at/the9realms
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ArtiPeeps 
Again, a really successful clutch of poems. Very well done!
These are all just gorgeous. Wonderful!