My apologies for silence, although this is the season of silence. It’s a busy season too, with the rustle of leaves — the grove’s Samhain last week, our secular Halloween party this week and some haunting computer issues in between (solved for now by the exorcists at Drivermax.)
I probably posted this in the past, but I thought I’d share two of the poems we used in our grove’s Samhain rite. Both are by me. One was the invocation to the Cailleach, goddess of the occasion (the other deity was Bile). The other called the ancestors.
invocation at the western gate
Old prayers blow in gray boughs by the well-edge, clooties, banners of causes unremembered. The Old Mother sews them together into a quilt of the unspoken. The figures of broken clay she knits together under the wave.
Remember. Sew together the edges of what was lost for a shroud, a bridal veil, a blanket for a newborn.
Bubbling forth, the spring from the deep, the tear from the eye, the blood from the wound. Salt on the tongue, it gathers to itself, flows forth, flows forth, rivulet and wave.
The voices of the dead are our voices. They echo from that sea isle, as the cattle of Tethra leap from the wave. They wait on that far isle, arms reaching and whole, in the sunset that is sunrise, the harvest that is a sowing.
Remember. Sew together the edges of what was lost for a shroud, a bridal veil, a blanket for a newborn.
a gray dusk and the wind stirs the dunes. gulls dance wave-side as a bobbing child collects shells. an old man writes with his feet on the shore as he remembers Niamh, the white horse, the breaking saddle.
unseen, the lights of Murias glitter through the gloom on the farthest shore. a coracle climbs the waves, in reaching toward and forward, betwixt and beyond. a song waits, a cauldron, a full belly, a cup of truth.
The voices of the dead are our voices.
Remember. Sew together the edges of what was lost for a shroud, a bridal veil, a blanket for a newborn.
waning moon, void of course
just some poetic musing on the fly….
bones crack as winter rides the body
she rides the weak steed
into the white road
sap cracks and sputters
in the white fire of the cold
without spark, without light
and in the east, a wan sun
gingerly steps over
the mountains’ sharp edges
the razor way, they call it
the warrior’s path with
the bright god vaulting the bridge
and landing in its center —
the balance that tips the knife
and wrests secrets from the dark
but you are no warrior
and you know it
and burrow deep in the white
waning moon, void of course
houseless in the Cailleach’s cold
as she carries mountains in her skirts