Samhain

Image by Denise Sallee.  © Denise Sallee 2016

 

 

 

 

 

Samhain by Annie Finch

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.

Annie Finch, "Samhain" from Eve, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Copyright © 1997 by Annie Finch

The Prince of Day by Ella Young

PRINCE OF DAY

Image by Denise Sallee. © Denise Sallee 2010

by Ella Young

White dawn before sunrise
Wherein the dawn-star dies
When Helios lifts his head,
White dawn and ambient air
Let all the hours be fair
Since night’s star-dust is shed:
Grant me this morn of May
For joyous holiday
Franked with thorn-blossom red.

(From the typed manuscript of Seed of the Pomegranate – University of California, Los Angeles, Special Collections)

Available in:At the Gates of Dawn: A Collection of Writings by Ella Young. Edited by John Matthews, Denise Sallee 

"Unicorn"

 

 

 

Unicorn  by Ella Young

Forth from the Wood of Dreams last night,
(The ensorcelled Wood that my heart fears.)
There came a Unicorn more white
Than blossoming first the thorn appears:
A lovely perilous sight
Lifting desirous lips to berries of the yew-tree,
The poison-sweet red berries of the yew!

All as it went the way was flowered
With slender lilies honey-dowered:
It crushed them head by scarlet head
Nor grieved the last that they were dead
Nor that its stained hooves were red,
Lifting desirous lips to berries of the yew-tree,
The poison-sweet red berries of the yew.

Published:  Horn Book, March 1939 and Smoke of Myrrh, 1950

The Sea-Kings Daughters

Image by Denise Sallee
© Denise Sallee 2015

From  THE MASK TOOTHED WITH JACINTH by Ella Young.
Included in:

At the Gates of Dawn: A Collection of Writings by Ella Young.

Pairings #1

By AE (George William Russell 1867-1935

First he was her mentor and her spiritual guide.  Then he was her dear friend. Then she left him when she left Ireland. 

 Ella Young's words and AE's images...

More of Ella Young's mystical poetry and her retelling of old Irish tales are available in the anthology I co-edited with John Matthews and published by Skylight Press. 

At the Gates of Dawn: A Collection of Writings by Ella Young.

CLEENA

Pale, in the twilight, the crested waves are falling
On a lone shore where never a sea-bird strays;
Softly the twilight wind is calling, calling,
Calling for Cleena of the olden days.

Once a thousand lovers sang her praises,
Wove her name in chant and storied rann;
Cleena, for whose sake the sea-god raises,
Wave on wave, his crested foam-white clan.

Gods and heroes once the battle-gear uplifted
All for Cleena of the curling, golden head;
O’er her beauty now the dust has drifted,
The songs are silent, and her lovers dead.

Only where waves in shadowy foam are falling,
Falling, falling ever, with a sound of tears,
Earth and sea a vanished joy recalling
Mourn for Cleena and the long-forgotten years.

Mournful wind, your grief cannot avail her.
Sea-foam drifting, drifting through the night–
She has peace and silence, why bewail her?
Cleena! Cleena! Dead, forgotten quite!

 - Ella Young from Poems (1906)

Reverie, Poetry, Love and Yeats

I have only now discovered the writings of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) and am searching locally for his 1960 book The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos.  I must own this book!  

This quote from the book strikes me on a very personal note today as Peter's birthday draws near:  

"Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed. The reveries of two souls prepare the sweetness of loving…The reality of love is mutilated when it is detached from all its unrealness."

The mundane is the enemy of love.  The mundane is the enemy of art.  

This, Peter and Yeats understood.  

Photograph by Peter Reichelt Hughes.  All Rights Reserved.

A Poet To His Beloved by William Butler Yeats

I BRING you with reverent hands

The books of my numberless dreams,

White woman that passion has worn

As the tide wears the dove-gray sands,

And with heart more old than the horn

    

That is brimmed from the pale fire of time:

White woman with numberless dreams,

I bring you my passionate rhyme.

Sparsity - words & writing

I've been dipping my toes into the yet unchartered waters of social media and, for the most part, I've been having a good time. As in my "real" life I avoid politics and social issues/causes. Instead, I want the years left to me to find their focus in the creative endeavor - mine and others.

So, I've noticed that haiku - that sparse and beautifully light form of poetry - has returned. When I see the word Haiku I am immediately whisked back to my childhood when, at some point, it was introduced to me in school.  I remember that it held great fascination for me - like an exotic plant or the whispered memory of a faraway land.

The college library where I work has a new book on haiku:  Favor of Crows by Gerald Vizenor. With a title such as this I was drawn to it and the "aha!" of synchronicity went off when I read the cover and saw that word -again. Haiku.

Perhaps I was onto something worth exploring.

Vizenor writes briefly of his first encounter with haiku and quotes a few examples from the Japanese masters.

I like this one by Kobayashi Issa as he remembers the death of his daughter:

            the world of dew
           is the world of dew
                   and yet…
                   and yet…


Vizenor, in the introduction to his book, speaks of the essence of haiku:  "The heart of haiku is a tease of nature, a concise, intuitive, and original moment."  And this statement recalls the later poetry of Ella Young - her work now influenced by her new home in California.  I leave you with her words:

Artemis (1950).

The moon took off her mask for me

Yester-night,

I saw her strange face

Ivory-white.

Crouching in the jungle, too,

The leopard saw:

And stretched in haughty greeting

A scimitar claw.

Bee-loud glade

Today, I spent a few wonderful hours with my friend Kathy who has recently become a bee keeper. Her land is a-buzz - both with bees and with blooms. Happy bees, happy blooms.  I brought with me Carol Ann Duffy's volume of wondrous poetry entitled The Bees.  I discovered Duffy while living in Ireland - she was being interviewed on the radio and she read a few poems. I was hooked.   I read very, very little poetry written after 1950. I think many "poets" think that writing prose in short lines is the same as writing poetry.  Wrong, very wrong.  Each word should be thoughtfully, consciously formed and perfect in its relationship one to the other. And the words should render not only meaning and imagery but we need to smell them, touch them and hear them - let them buzz among the blooms.


Virgils' Bees

Bless air's gift of sweetness, honey
from the bees, inspired by clover,
marigold, eucalyptus, thyme,
the hundred perfumes of the wind.
Bless the beekeeper

                              who chooses for her hives
a site near water, violet beds, no yew,
no echo. Let the light lilt, leak, green
or gold, pigment for queens,
and joy be inexplicable but there
in harmony of willowherb and stream,
of summer heat and breeze, 

                                         each bee's body
at its brilliant flower, lover-stunned,
strumming on fragrance, smitten.

                                                 For this,
let gardens grow, where beelines end,
sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia;
where bees pray on their knees, sing, praise
in pear trees, plum trees; bees
are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.

Photograph © Denise Sallee 2013