Winifred Hodge Rose
Here is a song / poem I wrote about the Norn who rules over the process of Becoming, the perpetual moment what What-Might-Be becomes What-Is. Her name in Old Norse is Verðandi; since I like to use the Anglo-Saxon or Old English language I translate her name as Werðende here.
Werðende: Song of Becoming
Red the threads of Werðende’s weaving,
Blood of birth and life brings she.
Her needle’s point, a world unfolding:
The endless Now of budding deeds.
The wave of Time moves on unmoving,
Just as a wave moves not the Sea.
All flows past that point of shaping:
What is becoming, what should be.
Pierced with knowledge no words capture,
Thread on which worlds hang like pearls,
The soul is strung, that seeks to venture
Within the Well’s green-shaded furls.
Cupped in moss, the deepest wonder
Of all that is, lies hidden here.
Drops of dew, the Tree’s deed-plunder,
Fall through boughs like sweat and tears.
A mighty maid, come from the East-lands,
Gowned in red sits spinning there,
With sisters two; their threefold shaping
Weaves a web both dark and fair.
And over all, the great Tree arches,
The shape of all that has been won.
Life flows through its limber branches:
Thread that Werðende’s hands do spin.
There’s a little oddity in the last line of this poem, where the rhyme would be better this way: “Thread that Werðende’s hands have spun.” Out of my deep respect for her, I make a gentle vow to Werðende that when I speak to her or about her, to the best of my ability I speak only in the present tense, to honor her status as the Norn of the present moment of coming-into-Being. The final line of the poem causes a tiny jerk of attention to Werðende’s foundation in the present moment: never past, never future, never ‘perfected’ in the sense of completed and finished, always budding into the perpetual Now. Thus, Werðende stands as the sacred gatekeeper of the quantum realm, at the imperceptible edge where Might-Be becomes What-Is.