Poems for the Equinoxes

Image for the Spring Equinox, March 20
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Image of a Reborning God, at the Start of Spring
When the darkness lifted
and the mists parted,
I found you in my arms
Soft-skinned,
Innocent,
Bright-eyed as a child,
Awakening,
Wondering,
Marveling . . .
The sap is running from the tree roots
up, up again into the furthest reaches of the limbs
to become verdant green foliage
To nurture and shade those that walk in your shadow
To moisten and refresh
To gather and feedEmbrace life
Repair
RebuildYou cannot help it
It moves in you,
whether you will it or not
Nurture, and be nurtured
Protect, and be protected
Give joy, and be joyful
Sing, and be sung to
The fertility of life pushes through you
You are not its end product
The joy of living is
Pick the first fruits and eat of them:
they will quench your vast thirst
with their sweetness and pungency
You cannot stop growth when it returns
any more than you can stop the earth from spinning
But you can sing to it




Image for the Summer Solstice, June 21
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Image of a Ripe God, at the height and fullness of SummerThe icon of the mature god
is a man with flowers twined in his hair.
Do not pass that statement by too quickly,
read it again: a man with flowers twined in his hair.
Think about it. This state does not exist in
modern society. A man who is comfortable with
his sexuality, who enjoys it, even flaunts it,
but comfortably and beautifully.
Where do you know of this in the modern world,
except maybe on the silver screen?
No, we have inelegant teens, hungry and horny,
scrabbling and scrapping, reading Playboy but
unable to think of what to say to a beautiful
woman who tries to talk to them at a party.
And then, almost as soon as men become somewhat
comfortable with their sexuality, they become
plunged into the rat-race of work, and tend to
lose their sexuality somewhere between the 8to5
grind and the tv set that gives them the space
they need to do it again the next day.
That's what attracts us to the idea of adventurers,
hobos, beats, rich people, movie stars . . .
(Not to say that such people in real life are
any more together. It's the dream that attracts,
the archetype, the animus . . . as usual.)
So, let us take a moment and imagine ourselves
out of this world, to what it could be like.
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The earth lies down in fullness
and rises up dancing.
The king and queen of the heavens
are mating tonight,
prancing in the summer heat,
their sweat rising in xxxs,
their breaths melting the last chills of winter,
their rolling bodies making a mat to catch
the warm dew.
When I saw you, I knew what it was to no longer
be alone.
I knew that whether we came closer or not,
the world was a richness beyond belief.
I want to treasure you, in whatever way you allow me to.
I want to make you feel all that you can feel,
to go inside your mind and welcome out the you in you,
to taste and learn your ways as you do mine,
but still to see strengths and weaknesses,
to dive deep, unobstructed, accepting, compassionate,
passionate, truthful . . .
the intimate and the mundane, the funny and the serious,
the sensual, the mysterious, all honored and protected.




Image for the Autumn Equinox, September 23
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Image of a Mature God, in the Autumn of His Years
In the morning, he sees himself in the mirror of the
feeble dawn sky, eyes tired and wary, skin full and slack
with the thickness of his adulthood stretched and pinioned
to his bones. His hair has begun to reflect the night sky,
points of starlight dusting its tips.
He moves slower now, ponders more the nature of the universe.
His days are dedicated to completion, plumbing the richness
of culture for its treasures; in one hand he holds an image
of the sea and its moistness, in the other he holds an image
of wanderings in the desert of the sun. His hands are strong
and have learned tenderness, and to discern nuances that
would have seemed trivial and unreal in his youthful days.
His afternoons are filled with work that he knows and treasures,
and in which he knows his way and feels as comfortable as a husband
of many years who knows the weak points and strong points
of a wife. He does his work with the skill born of familiarity,
no longer reaching for dizzying heights, but with extreme
care and concern to fulfill a standard of quality which he
has developed. He treasures the community with which he has
joined himself during his time on this earth, and pits himself
to strengthening it, for now, and for those who come after.
In the quiet evenings, he sits with himself, or sometimes with
his offspring, and contemplates the energy and vitality of
youth, often with a devilish gleam in his eye that remembers.
He has patience in everything, but especially with youth,
for he can recapture in his bones and muscles and sexuality
the rushing of blood, the tingling of nerves, and the heat
and breathings of animal wildness that once stirred more
strongly in him. Winking has become habitual.
He has planted trees in those days that are now mature,
made friends with animals that are now senescent but loyal.
He harvests from his own orchard and fields too much for
his own use, and spreads these among his friends.
He has built his house - meagre though it be, it is quite
adequate and satisfactory for him - on a strong foundation,
and he is pleased to offer its shelter to those that
are still searching for inner strength and buffeted by gales.
In the nights, he dreams, or sees and hears the cosmos in the
vastness of the night sky. He reconnects each time with the
wilderness, impetuousness, capriciousness, and irascibility
of nature with which he has now become familiar, and which
he greets with recognition, and therefore less of the sadness
that eternally accompanies them.
His days are accompanied by walking drums, dancing drums,
deep drums, and the splash of cymbals, but his nights . . .
ah, his nights are filled with the pungent whine of faraway
bagpipes and bombardes, with harps and violins, with the
chanting of monks in stoney-cool abbeys, all over the distant
cries of women wailing . . .
And when he sleeps, he sleeps in softness, hugging the world
around him and smelling its earth odors, its flesh, its
fluids, its flowery perfumes and the moistness of its caves,
and loves it fully with the sadness of one who will
eventually have to leave it.
He reaches out sometimes, still mostly in dreams - for he
has still the winter ahead for completion of this cycle -
to repair and rebuild connections he has lost or that have
slipped away. The emergency of this work has not yet
blossomed in him, but it is beginning to peer in at him
with a beady and unforgiving eye which sends shivers
and sweats through his being when he cannot stop seeing it.
And autumn reaches its fullness . . .



Image for Samhain,
which, due to the precession of the equinoxes,
should now actually fall on November 8
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Image of a Dying God, at the Start of Winter
Darkening breaths echo through
the chambers of the soul
and stillness resounds down narrow hallways
filled with the tarnish of hollow years
In
Out
In
Out
Concentration pulls stars from the sky
and lights bonfires that challenge fear
and trace electric fingers along bones
The spirit of time flickers across synapses
Lost in the anguish of the new
Time never stops,
not for the sick, not for the old,
not for the child running to catch fireflies
before the streetlights go on
Buried deep within the road
is the turnoff
Nevertheless there is calmness
or perhaps calmness was born on the same day
and played tag with self-knowledge
and its ironic revelation of the world
Dryness may grow to become you
The lily pad folds over to become a shroud
You hear the water rocking ceaselessly from the
depths of the ocean
And little birds flap their spidery wings
across the sun
In
Out
In
Out
And you ask
Which mind am I doing that with?
Sleep now, so you may awaken