Adrift in the Rings of Hafliet in the softness of gloetied evening on the planetoid Laslan, the people gather. It is the night of Graet Stoeree, and the Lastuons come to the Graet Plaes.

From the Eebn Plaes, the dwarfish Caevns come with faces hidden beneath blackened domes glinting above their velvet suits worn only for the Graet Stoeree Gathering. From the Flat Plaes, the homeless Roemrs come in their hafcast capes and Lostiem dress. From the Vels, the Leeds come in their golden robes, bringing the Graet Stoeree feast. Down from the Skie Mas, the Munteers come to wait beside the Graet Plaes arch and greet the travelers as they gather on the plain of Landen Plaes.

This night all will eat together as one family.

When the feast is over and the Graet Songs have been sung, as the last flowing of the gloetied passes beyond the Skie Mas, the Graet Stoeree Telr rises from the Landen Plaes and stands beneath the Graet Plaes arch to tell again the Graet Stoeree.

“Once in the Lostiem in the black void beyond the farthest sun in the Emptee Plaes, there was a green planet of blue and white.

On this planet there was a man, strong like the Munteers, as handsome as the greatest of the Leeds, wise like the Caevns and gifted with a power stranger than the mystic games of the Roemrs. Like us, he did not belong to that planet but came there from a better place. Unlike us, he chose to go there and could return to his home at any time.

He came in a starship which glided slowly over the land until it came to rest in the place, Bethlum. So great was  he that he could guide the starship when he was just a tiny one. He was so small the people of that planet thought he was just an infant.

There was a man and a woman in Bethlum who had no child, and they cared for him as if he were their own son. After he had found a home with the man and the woman, he told his great father who then sent an army to tell the people of Bethlum that they should honor and protect his son.

And the people did. Great Leeds, called kings, came to give him gifts, and homeless ones came to receive his wisdom. But some did not believe the power of the tiny one and tried to harm him. So he hid from these people and pretended that he was one of the people of that planet and belonged to the man and the  woman. The people then forgot his father’s great army and he grew and lived like the children of that place.

But one day, his great father called to him saying “You are grown now, my son, and you must do what I sent you to do.” So, the son, who now looked like a man, left the place where he was and began a new life….”

In the shadowless night of Graet Stoeree

On the plain of Landen Plaes

The Lastuons listen with the ears of children

In the hushed silence of their hearts.

#Christmas #ChristmasStory #ChristmasandScienceFantasy

I am told that I am angry,

that my anger has been cultured

out of mind.

 

I am told that I have not sought

the mountain top

because the path was sabotaged-

mother, father, brother, sister

all contributing traps, fences,

exploding mines to bar the way.

 

But I never was a serious climber.

It is too hard, even without

gendercidal barriers.

I do not like to fight,

though I have and I do.

I must sometimes fight

to be allowed not to scale

some looming mountain peak.

 

Yet it is true.

I feel my gender’s anger

for the oppressive fear

that denied my freedom of dress,

the freedom of traveling alone,

of living alone.

 

Why am I,

like the many of a hated race,

made to feel an ever-present fear,

Ambush always seeming imminent,

No place of safety,

and no freedom to forget

the nearness of the threat?

 

Why has this constant terror

been supported as tradition,

a culturally accepted norm?

 

For this crippling of my life

there is anger–

a raging inferno that would, if loosed,

be matched only

by the devastation

at the birth of a volcano.

#Feminism #ViolenceAgainstWomen