The Lost Riddle

I call this "The Lost Riddle" because I lost it and found it in some old papers the other day. It is a different sort of riddle than so many of the others because the answer isn't exactly an object. And that's all the help I'm gonna' give on this one.

The first signs of spring

I'm a guy and all, and guys don't usually do flowers, but having lived through my first winter back in the USA after missing three of them in a row in a land of perpetual sunshine and warmth, I was feeling rather ready for spring, so you can imagine my thrill at seeing these things pop up in my back yard. I've never exactly thought of flowers as a sign of triumph before, but that is exactly what they are.

Mary Ann McCray

Taking a break from riddles this week and I thought I'd put together a ghost story. I wrote the words to this back in the 90's for a poetry class with the poet, Jared Carter who seemed to like all my poetry, and I, in turn, rather enjoyed his class, though others hated him because he could be pretty straight with the punches. I and a few of the other students went out for beer with him a few times and he cold talk. I remember him saying that after the end of the cold war, we would see a shift in our attention to having wars in the Middle East, since presidents often need wars to distract people from real issues at home. He may have been right about that, but he was also a big talker, with lots of opinions. I don't mind that with people as long as they laugh at themselves when their baloon gets popped, and as long as they are willing to tolerate other people's view points.

Anyway, I love a good ghost story--this one is kind of ambiguous as ghost stories go--I left it a bit unclear wheter Mary Ann McCray was really a ghost or not. She may never had died and may have been simply assumed into the court of harest maids. The Harvest Queen is a kind of Diana/Demeter goddess. The idea being that old gods and goddesses hide themselves in rual areas and have resorted to stealth in a time when people no longer believe in them except for certain times of the year when something in us remembers full moons and ancient festival days in spite of ourselves. I wrote this because my class was in the fall and Halloween was coming up. It is a time of year when my mind always turns to James Wibcomb Riley and "Little Orphant Anne" (the spelling is his). I've often thought we need more like them for the season, so I wrote one in a differen vein.