Traditional meaning: hail
Meanings when upright:
Meanings when inverted:
Hagalaz can be useful for:
Anglo-Saxon rune poem:
Hægl byþ hwitust corna;
hwyrft hit of heofones lyfte,
wealcaþ hit windes scura;
weorþeþ hit to wætere syððan.
Hail is the whitest of grain;
it is whirled from the vault of heaven
and is tossed about by gusts of wind
and then it melts into water.
Norwegian rune poem:
Hagall er kaldastr korna;
Kristr skóp hæimenn forna.
Hail is the coldest of grain;
Christ created the world of old.
A modern poem:
Blow the ashes in their eyes,
the gentle breath they do despise.
The hail comes down, delivered by the wind
you said was my wealth, my dividend.I cannot help who I am,
or what I have become.
And who I have turned into
is a gleaming no one,
nobody at all.You told me
we were
stagnating.Self-baptismal in just-thawed lake
I had just enough strength to break
the surface of, watch the ice shatter
like that which gave birth to you: the mirror.
You swore to be my eternal blue,
and my skin now swears by the same hue,
lake draining into a trickle of a stream
that, if followed, will drain into Yewiffe,into a root of midnight hands
and walking home from shift at the grill
wondering, what if I, feral, disappeared
into those lonely snow-blanketed lands
that bordered me at every turn?
Highway headlights also a stream
draining into boundless woods
where I easily could swear I would
disappear with you as if in a dream.Sablade, I promised, would be cloaked
in sunny promising eternal spring,
but the thought of ever losing you bades me
to accept hail's cloak, frozen sleeping.