Saturday, October 31, 2015

Happy Samhain (Halloween)!

Las night we did a season's end trip to the Taylors Falls Drive-In and each had a healthy food bison burger. Winter isn't even here yet and already I have something besides the upcoming holidays to look forward to, the Drive-In reopening next Spring. I've been eating more Halloween candy than's good for me for the past week or so, so Halloween's not something I'm looking forward to, it's something I'm already enjoying. In the twenty-plus years we've lived here, I don't recall a single trick-or-treater ringing our door bell. We'll see if tonight's any different. The photo's a ghost of Jacko-lanterns past, since this year's pumpkins still await carving later today.

bats from the haunted castle's belfry
bats from the haunted castle's belfry
Photo by J. Harrington

Although I'm growing older, I continue to avoid, as much as possible, growing up. In the case of Halloween, I've discovered a story that it originated with the Celtic celebration of Samhain. I'll do more studying up on that over the Winter and see if I can be better prepared for an older but improved celebration this time next year. Maybe I'll have to decide whether to dress as a leprechaun or a Celtic poet.

Samhain 

(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.



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