Day 711 of the Daily Poems. Our poet Fiona Clark has spent Samhain embracing the darkness. To explain, Fiona says “Samhain is a key point of the Celtic Wheel of the Year, celebrating both darkness and light, birth and death, from which Hallowe’en arose in Christian traditions. At Samhain, the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. The Darkness is emblematic of Winter. The Teutonic and Celtic deities are symbols of death and darkness.”
Embracing the darkness
Blue air flensed by the knife of the wind,
swifts turn and vanish: they are gone.
Earth bared to the beaks of gulls
who rip and tear for buried meat.
Darkness enters in disguise
of patchwork red and yellow,
with a white beard of willowherb,
and a rattle of empty peascods.
Rye Mother stalks the fields,
famine-eyed, her skinny fingers clutch
at children running among the stacks,
those bristled effigies of straw –
brain matter blown by the wind,
hands, a straggle of dry grasses.
Feldgeister scurry on corn-stalk legs.
Roggenwolf howls with eternal hunger.
Full moon rises, over field and forest,
bone-face bright with borrowed gold.
Carved from living trees, Lugh
and Ceridwen, light and darkness,
prophecy and poetry, keep silent
counsel under the long-shadowed moon.
Fiona Clark
in Littoral press this month, for Samhain.