I hired the best musicians to beautify the background
through dinner meals or as we sat at the fire,
and I played the violin, taught by a traveling magician.
I learned the songs of my people and of his also.
I had a voice the animals in the field would stop to hear.
I bathed in herbs the magician gave me and smoothed
my arms and legs with perfumed oils that came
on the ships from the East. I searched my own thoughts
for fragments of unloveliness and found only smoke
trails of my desire spiraling like a downed goose
toward the forest he would not enter.
–Shaun Perkins
Rural Oklahoma Museum of Poetry 
Thank you for sharing this poem, Shaun!
And thank you, Sandy, for reading. It’s another reworking of one of my many Arthurian poems from 2005–the fabulous rites year!