Samhain

Samhain - Annie Finch

 

(The Celtic Halloween)

 

In the season leaves should love,

since it gives them leave to move

through the wind, towards the ground

they were watching while they hung,

legend says there is a seam

stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil

earth from the sky in one last pale

wave, as autumn dies to bring

winter back, and then the spring,

we who die ourselves can peel

back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.

Tonight at last I feel it shake.

I feel the nights stretching away

thousands long behind the days

till they reach the darkness where

all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch

move with me, and when I brush

my own mind across another,

I am with my mother's mother.

Sure as footsteps in my waiting

self, I find her, and she brings

arms that carry answers for me,

intimate, a waiting bounty.

"Carry me." She leaves this trail

through a shudder of the veil,

and leaves, like amber where she stays,

a gift for her perpetual gaze.

Halloween Mask

The scariest thing of all? Not demons, but human nature.

 
Empire of Dreams  - Charles Simic 

On the first page of my dreambook

It’s always evening

In an occupied country.   

Hour before the curfew.   

A small provincial city.   

The houses all dark.

The storefronts gutted.

I am on a street corner   

Where I shouldn’t be.   

Alone and coatless

I have gone out to look

For a black dog who answers to my whistle.   

I have a kind of Halloween mask

Which I am afraid to put on.

The Haunted Chamber

  

'Each heart has its haunted chamber...'

Perhaps the most haunting thing of all - the ghosts we keep in our own hearts.


The Haunted Chamber - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Each heart has its haunted chamber,
  Where the silent moonlight falls!
On the floor are mysterious footsteps,
  There are whispers along the walls!

And mine at times is haunted
  By phantoms of the Past
As motionless as shadows
  By the silent moonlight cast.

A form sits by the window,
  That is not seen by day,
For as soon as the dawn approaches
  It vanishes away.

It sits there in the moonlight
  Itself as pale and still,
And points with its airy finger
  Across the window-sill.

Without before the window,
  There stands a gloomy pine,
Whose boughs wave upward and downward
  As wave these thoughts of mine.

And underneath its branches
  Is the grave of a little child,
Who died upon life's threshold,
  And never wept nor smiled.

What are ye, O pallid phantoms!
  That haunt my troubled brain?
That vanish when day approaches,
  And at night return again?

What are ye, O pallid phantoms!
  But the statues without breath,
That stand on the bridge overarching
  The silent river of death?

Bluebeard

 

A short and sharp take on the Bluebeard story by Sylvia Plath. 

Bluebeard - Sylvia Plath

I am sending back the key
that let me into bluebeard’s study;
because he would make love to me
I am sending back the key;
in his eye’s darkroom I can see
my X-rayed heart, dissected body:
I am sending back the key
that let me into bluebeard’s study.

Incantation

It's almost Halloween... when the 'witchery' of autumn is in plain sight. 

from Incantation - George Parsons Lathrop

When the leaves, by thousands thinned,
A thousand times have whirled in the wind,
And the moon, with hollow cheek,
Staring from her hollow height,
Consolation seems to seek
From the dim, reechoing night;
And the fog-streaks dead and white
Lie like ghosts of lost delight
O’er highest earth and lowest sky;
Then, Autumn, work thy witchery!

After the Storm

May Perpetual Light Shine - Patricia Spears Jones

We have encountered storms 

Perfect in their drench and wreck

 

Each of us bears an ornament of grief

A ring, a notebook, a ticket torn, scar

It is how humans know their kind—

 

What is known as love, what can become  

the heart’s food stored away for some future

Famine

 

Love remains a jewel in the hand, guarded

Shared fragments of earth & air   drift & despair.

 

We ponder what patterns matter other than moons and tides:

musical beats—rumba or waltz or cha cha cha

cosmic waves like batons furiously twirling

colors proclaiming sparkle of darkness

as those we love begin to delight

in the stars embracing

 

Storm Warnings

We are currently in the middle of a hurricane in Ireland. (Ireland!)

Stormy weather always makes me think of this poem.

Storm Warnings - Adrienne Rich

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of grey unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.

Night

It Is Difficult to Speak of the Night  - Jack Gilbert

It is difficult to speak of the night.
It is the other time. Not
an absence of day.
But where there are no flowers
to turn away into.
There is only this dark
and the familiar place of my body.
And the voices calling out
of me for love.
This is not the night of the young:
their simple midnight of fear.
Nor the later place to employ.
This dark is a major nation.
I turn to it at forty
and find the night in flood.
Find the dark deployed in process.
Clotted in parts, in parts
flowing with lights.
The voices still keen of the divorce
we are born into.
But they are farther off,
and do not interest me.
I am forty, and it is different.
Suddenly in mid passage
I come into myself. I leaf
gigantically. An empire yields
unexpectedly: cities, summer forests,
satrapies, horses.
A solitude: an enormity.
Thank god.

Grief

For the week that's in it. 


Grief - Raymond Carver

Woke up early this morning and from my bed
looked far across the Strait to see
a small boat moving through the choppy water,
a single running light on. Remembered
my friend who used to shout
his dead wife’s name from hilltops
around Perugia. Who set a plate
for her at his simple table long after
she was gone. And opened the windows
so she could have fresh air. Such display
I found embarrassing. So did his other
friends. I couldn’t see it.
Not until this morning.

October, Daphne's Month

'Autumn Goddess' by Moon Dreamer

Posted this one before, but it's so beautiful it merits a reposting. 

October - Linda Pastan

How suddenly

the woods

have turned

again. I feel

like Daphne, standing

with my arms

outstretched

to the season,

overtaken

by color, crowned

with the hammered gold

of leaves.

Letter in October

A Letter in October - Ted Kooser

Dawn comes later and later now, 

and I, who only a month ago 

could sit with coffee every morning 

watching the light walk down the hill 

to the edge of the pond and place 

a doe there, shyly drinking, 

then see the light step out upon 

the water, sowing reflections 

to either side—a garden 

of trees that grew as if by magic— 

now see no more than my face, 

mirrored by darkness, pale and odd, 

startled by time. While I slept, 

night in its thick winter jacket 

bridled the doe with a twist 

of wet leaves and led her away, 

then brought its black horse with harness 

that creaked like a cricket, and turned 

the water garden under. I woke, 

and at the waiting window found 

the curtains open to my open face; 

beyond me, darkness. And I, 

who only wished to keep looking out, 

must now keep looking in. 

Into October

'the colors of returning...'


Into October - WS Mervin

These must be the colors of returning
the leaves darkened now but staying on
into the bronzed morning among the seed heads
and the dry stems and the umbers of October
the secret season that appears on its own
a recognition without a sound
long after the day when I stood in its light
out on the parched barrens beside a spring
all but hidden in a tangle of eglantine
and picked the bright berries made of that summer