A Murraya Princess for an Elvish King

A Murraya Princess for an Elvish King 28th April 2008 6pm

I caught myself praying today, I had been walking to the library and then, almost unconsciously, I was drawn to the Murraya hedge. The garden's avenue along which I often wander is bordered on either side by its green pews of orange jasmine (Murraya paniculata), and overlooked by its cathedral columns of arbour’s arch and autumn leaf. Level with my nose, I, like a bee, or butterfly had therein rested.
Impatient to the monopoly of movement of pedestrian steps around me, I was momentarily lost in green, and white. I had stopped and bowed my head in prayer. I prayed to the flowers there. I prayed to their surge of scent - heaven's scent - scent composed of earth and water, and the night air. Scent composed from the surging sap sucked up by sunlight and held within the green palms of the murraya priestesses and their sprigs of white – their flowers like the light of the moon that twist to their tunes of the night.
Night jasmine does that, it signals the sighs of green scents, the scents and sense of breath of the goddess within. Sure tis the way to hear the earth sighing, to sense in her crying her erotic entrapments and scents that are flying, casting spells from her fingers and hands that would draw us all near. Draw us to her bed, her garden bed of butterflies and moths.
If I had stood there long enough I could therein have merged with the green, sucked within to remain unseen. The green man given to his leanasidhe bride, I could have been trapped inside. I once knew a blackthorn hedge. Her white flowers were hung to ensnare and magnetic were her charms to a man like me, looking for things that I could not see, all wise things tied to an ancient's memory.
But now I do remember, for such whispered words have come to me, of Thomas the Rhymer and his Eildon Tree, who had met his Lady there, enticed by a woman he wished to see, a woman he wished to snare, but she snared him, in him her hope held he, that he’d become her Elvish King, that she had found by her Eildon Tree.