Tag Archives: pagan

Pomegranate

The kids have crowded round in the tall, darkened room. Lame jokes are told, muffled behind plastic masks. I hand out sweets and money.

“Would anyone like some of this? It’s a dragon’s heart!”

I tear open the pomegranate melodramatically, juice spraying, and the garnet-encrusted centre is revealed. A few dare to eat the sweet, seeded drops, discarding bitter yellow substrate. Only later do my children relate that one of the party fled the house in terror.

Finding the deer skull… Walking into the hillside woods, along the forestry track. I’m hungry for solitude and quietness of mind. Breaking off the trail, I descend into the conifers, expecting nothing, just wandering and being with what is.

She’s there on the brown, dead needles, like a pale jewel set on dark velvet. I gently lift her up and carry her home, feeling somehow she’s part of me, some wild and fragile soul spending solitary hours enjoying simplicity among the trees.

Since then, at Samhain, she keeps me company through the festival of the dead, of ancestry, of the endless line of souls we watch as we walk backwards into the future.

Brighid

Soon it will be her day, this unfamiliar Goddess I only know from fleeting glimpses. Red ribbons set out on the boughs at dusk, retrieved with blessing against drowning after morning’s dew. Candles of pale blue lit at times of crisis and illness throughout the turning year.

They say she’s Goddess of smithcraft. Does she wield a ringing hammer in some smokey, charcoal-fired building? Does the water hiss as illumined red snarls into blackness? Does she coax great curves of copper into voluptuous vessels?

I wrote a poem once for her day, about loss and disintegration, followed by resolution, resurrection. Perhaps these snowdrop days have that sense, of slight shy signs of persistence and hope among the harsh snows and leafless trees. Do they have a scent? I think they might, and yet I barely wake up enough from churlishness of the dark half to bother to breathe it in.