Samhain

A montage in celebration of Halloween, albeit a few days late, we are celebrating Samhain today, with the full moon, and I wrote this poem this afternoon.

As Night Draws In

November evenings draw dark as coal as was once shaken from the hod as woollen blankets are drawn close wrapped against the draughts that once snook through every gap and under oak plank doors, and dawn brings blankets of damp white mists, pooled in the valleys thick as fleece and the sheep turn their backs to the drizzle to chew sparse grass in grim rumination while hoofs sink deep in autumnal mud and crows caw forelorn and gusts of breeze send showers of leaves falling to join those already piled in every corner, the trees bareing dark branches, adopting their silhouette form for winter withdrawn into the comfort of their roots firm in the bare earth. And we look too to our roots, our forbares, this Samhain, we gather our dead in rememberance and wear red. Summer’s maiden, child of light, turns to autumn’s cailleach, twisty witchy bitch hooded dark as pitch, hooke’d and crooked, twisted and turning as all things turn, the lush summer’s green to red brown and black winter’s crone. In this liminal time when the veil is thin, as sheets of fog cloak the vale, and we gather close our next of kin, lighting fires bright to ward off the night and warm us, door to door we collect the fuel, tricking our way place by place, turnip lanterns and mangle wurzels on the step, candle light guttering through grotesque rough cut features and bone is close covered by translucent pale skin, and we welcome our ancestors in, long dead, with us this Samhain. The wheel turns, as is the inevitability of time, a never ending flow, and we but leaves carried for a short while on this stream, never back, always on, now only to dream of summer meadow sweet, now to sleep deep in winter as night draws in this Samhain.