Henge, Barrow And Midsummer Hill
Oct. 23rd, 2007 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo HENGE, BARROW AND MIDSUMMER HILL
Henge, barrow and midsummer hill
Are stations in the sacred landscape.
Here the timeless Goddess enters
The times of her tribes. It was lifetimes back
And what it meant we have almost forgotten,
Almost forgotten.
We killed a child
With great honour and buried her body
Curled like a snail at the heart of the henge
Where earth spirits might rise through her grave,
Follow the curve of the bent bones
And spiral out among villagers dancing
The sunwheel dance that is danced in spring.
A captive ghost, in my meditation,
She takes my hand, but I cannot lead her
Beyond the ring where the magic fixed her.
She will be four years old forever,
And crowned with flowers.
But all the rest of us
Have to be laid in tribal earth
To be remade by the winter Goddess
Before we come back to the world again.
She is the sow that eats her farrow,
Old bones cracking within the barrow,
But to those whom she fails to frighten
A giver of gifts.
No corpses lie
On midsummer hill, but of all the stations
This is the saddest. The sun on high
Burns, burns as midsummer’s Queen
Hands over her whitening world to death-
The fields by severance and the woods
By slow decay. With her hair combed out
In its red gold sheaves she is perfect strength
And perfect beauty about to fade
As from this moment summer does-
And the child will leave its mother and
The long procession wind down the hill.
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 10:14 am (UTC)It doesn't bother me that it isn't "true". I read and write fiction about stuff I think is amazing or beautiful or frightening, but I really don't believe in most of it.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 12:14 pm (UTC)It's probably enough that I believed it at the time. It may be a load of codswallop but it's emotionally sincere.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 07:01 pm (UTC)Thanks
LS
no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 08:19 pm (UTC)There's a parallel thread running on The Modern Antiquarian at http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/forum/?thread=23046 that has a much wider readership than the Megalithic Poems blog. Poems posted on TMA are eventually moved over (with a photo or illustration) to the Meg Poems blog. If it's OK I'll post HENGE, BARROW AND MIDSUMMER HILL on TMA first. Needless to say copyright always stays with you, and if you have a particular image you'd like to use with your poem we'd try to use that as well.
LS
no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 09:50 pm (UTC)I don't have any particular illustration in mind, but if you could match the poem up with a suitable image of Silbury Hill that would be great.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-23 10:18 pm (UTC)And crowned with flowers.
Whether I believe that anyone ever did this or not, I like these lines.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-24 05:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-24 08:37 am (UTC)Have just put your poem up on The Modern Antiquarian at http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/forum/?thread=23046&message=554586 The layout on TMA doesn't allow for the first line of each verse to appear at the end of the line but I should be able to fix that when it goes up on the blog.
Many thanks once again.
LS
no subject
Date: 2007-10-24 09:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-24 09:28 am (UTC)I was doing a lot of visualisation exercises at the time and- true or not- I did "see" most of these things
no subject
Date: 2007-10-24 09:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-31 11:08 pm (UTC)http://megalithicpoems.blogspot.com/ Please let me know if you want me to change anything.
no subject
Date: 2007-11-01 09:52 am (UTC)An the accompanying photo of Silbury is just what I had in mind.