# Gar

Traditional meaning: Odin's spear

Meanings when upright:

- stop asking
- you're not supposed to know
- wait and watch
- you must go forward on faith alone

Meanings when inverted:

- you need to know

There is not a known Norwegian or Anglo-Saxon rune poem for Gar.

A modern poem:

> There used to be "forbidden questions"
> you would only answer with hesitation,
> would sometimes answer "no"
> just to throw
> a wrench in my anxiety's gears.

> Although
> I guess by now I should know
> that if you've loved me all these years,
> there's no reason you would stop now.
> Not after everything I've ever done
> or the atrocities I have yet to commit:
> your life is mine, you insist;
> I'm the only one you want to spend it with.

> I guess by now
> you've figured out
> that nervousness is my base nature,
> that while consciously I know,
> it hasn't pierced through all my layers.
> Hasn't come to reside
> in my left lung, straining for air,
> strung up with rope and left to die.

> It's said that Odin sacrificed
> himself to himself in this way,
> knowledge the thing that he sought.
> An alphabet to answer magic,
> guard rails for creative thought.

> Just as fated is Nidhogg
> to the roots of Yggdrasil forever gnaw,
> so I too lurk the underground of Yewiffe,
> stuck going in circles, unable to leave.
> This last rune standing at the end of time,
> a doorway out
> crossed out
> with two opposing lines.
> There's something in my past
> for which I am wracked with longing,
> but I can't find it
> and neither do I know what it is
> and going down is this ship
> and the blood
> in my lungs
> is pooling
> where the spear
> has pierced
> my side
> and in my own sorrow sans escape I am drowning.

> "I thought I told you-
> I thought you knew-
> that I'd never leave you behind."