[Picture: Taming the Unicorn, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2025 (Image from NydamPrints.com).]
April 24, 2026
U is for Unicorn
April 23, 2026
T is for Trickster
[Picture: Trickster’s Familiar, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2026 (Image from NydamPrints.com);
Tarasque, rubber block print with colored pencil by AEGNydam, 2026 (Image from NydamPrints.com).]
April 21, 2026
S is for Shabti
For a long time I waited, silent in the sand.
Feet planted, arms crossed, silent in my row.
For a long time I waited to respond to the command.
All was stillness, all was darkness, unvarying and slow.
For a long time I waited, patient for the call
To plow, to clear obstructions, to carry stones or sand.
For a long time I waited, my obedience a scrawl
Of symbols down my legs: my statement and my stand.
“I am here; I answer,” my painted spell declares,
To the master in whose likeness I am made.
All around me in the darkness are my master’s painted prayers…
But his heart has not returned from being weighed.
[Picture: Shabti, rubber block reduction print by AEGNydam, 2025 (Image from NydamPrints.com),
Siren Song, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2025 (Image from NydamPrints.com).]
April 20, 2026
R is for Rapunzel
The salad the mother craved became
The nascent infant in the nourished womb.
The garden the father robbed became
The nursery in which she grew.
The tower the sorceress built became
A tree of stone, as tall and straight
As the surrounding pines, and she, Rapunzel,
Spirit locked within that rocky trunk, became
Its dryad.
Her hair, like aerial roots, became
A pathway for the witch,
And then the man.
The thorns in which she fell became
The heartwood spine of a woman
Pruned from her mother’s arms,
Cast out from her walled garden,
Uprooted from her spirit tree.
Self-sown in the wilderness, she became
A wildflower, a weed,
Until her very tears were healing sap…
[Picture: The Herb Rapunzel, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2024 (Image from NydamPrints.com).]
April 18, 2026
Q is for Queen
[Picture: Mirror, Mirror, rubber block print by AEGNydam, 2025 (Image from NydamPrints.com).]
April 17, 2026
P is for Pandora
[Picture: Pandora Dreaming, wood block print with watercolor by AEGNydam, 2005 (Image from NydamPrints.com).]
April 16, 2026
O is for Owl
We have children grown now, with children of their own.
We have had joy together many years now, he and I.
I remember now that day’s late sunlight, slanting between leaves,
The strange beauty that pierced us, our joy in a minor key,
Until suddenly the castle walls loomed from the weird shadows
And the owl came circling three times with its nightfall wings.
As my soft voice became song, and my body wings,
My mind, too, shifted, slipped away, no longer my own.
My self was lost in the song, feathered in shadows,
And all I knew became the nightingale. I
Beat against the cage, as she carried me from my key -
His heart - left locked behind us among the darkening leaves.
Then I remembered neither speech nor hands, neither sky nor leaves,
Only wings in a wicker cage, which are no wings.
And in my nightingale mind only one fragile key
With which to keep locked the center of my own
Identity: the certainty that I could sing, that I
With song could claim space against shackles and shadows.
[Picture: Illustration for Jorinde Remembers, collage of elements from two rubber block prints by AEGNydam, 2026 (Image from Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns).]
















