|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bride is in the snowdrops, inside the green-tipped bells – and more frost forecast.
The moon sharpens in a star-shot sky and the Crone keens,
rages through branches, patterns ice-ferns in her dark kaleidoscope.
First thin light and here is Bride crouched among stamens:
petal-skinned February girl with a knife in her smile –
slowly she is coiling the bloodied Crone back into her womb.
Imbolc: one of the ancient Celtic festivals, 1st February Bride: Christianised version of the Maiden, Spring aspect of the Celtic Triple Goddess. The Crone: Winter aspect of the Triple Goddess.
The Cailleach cannot be stopped. Patiently she births herself from the body of the green girl, my mirror tells me this. I watch the Old One coming,
wind catching and flapping her rags, ruffling the feathers of her raven whose watchful head leans close. She shuffles through dry leaves to stand behind my left shoulder
and I hand her the unmarked oval of my face. Then she smiles my seasons into me, so implacable and tender that I want to keep her. In the mirror I watch her leave
ankle-deep in the blossoms of my eighteen year-old spring; but I have her now, in my skin, in the light patterning of crow's feet, the steady lines strung between us.
Cailleach (Gaelic) :Old woman. Winter aspect of the Celtic Triple Goddess
At first I see just painted strings, a thicket from ceiling to floor, with denser darkness at its centre,
simply twine and spotlit gloss, but with a shift of weight, sleight of eye, the space between the strings becomes
thin windows, strips of ice, or crystal pipes from some fantastic organ. Breezes whine and chime through brittle tubes
and coalescent air invents rooms, a castle of glass, perhaps a princess locked in rosy stasis, waiting
for her poisons to be lanced upon the lips of some hero, who is really her own self, stronger,
waiting in the late night gallery where strings are brambles and the artist transforms air.
She realises her daughter has been taken when she finds the spoon, syringe and powder ground from poppy sap. From her grainy fields Demeter stares into the faultline, watches darkness slither towards her.
She knows her shining girl is really gone when she comes home only to steal, mumbling the language of the underworld to blight her mother’s ears, the ways and moods of that sterile place hanging on her like smoke.
Unflinching in her grief, this mother would defoliate the summer fields but poisoned earth is killing crops faster than she can, distorted winds uproot the trees, and in the universities they are dismantling the necklaces of life.
No living coin to bargain with, she tracks her child to Hades’ laminated halls. The clean contempt of doctors smacks against her sky-filled eyes. She listens like a mountainside, while, in the trudging corridors,
Persephone smells barley and remembers how it shone.
|
|
©
of
all poems featured on this site remains with the
poet |
