WITH DARKENED STARS....(Halloween 2019)

 With darkened stars on holy ground.

You call to me, O *Samhain sky. (gaelic:*Sow in)

 The day wearies and rots.

Seasons swift to change.

 Souls torn. Your day shall come at dawn.

On this last night. This last journey to earth.

 With darkened stars on holy ground.

Souls that live. Pray for these  dead.

 Sliver glass as   snow.

Fingers reaching.

 Grasping at loam.

With darkened stars, on holy ground.

 Footsteps scrape.

Red  moon deities   circle like ravens.

 Light the bonfires.

This All saints Eve.

 All has passed two thousand years.

Footsteps clamber. Ever closer. Ever more.

 For those who lived, for those who died

 End of summer waning.

Harvest gone. 

 Dark winter comes.

The year anew,  begins .

 The day wearies and rots.

Footsteps pounding. 

 This night of Samhain reels.

Dead return to earth.

 Footsteps scrape.

Blurring worlds between..

 On this hallowed ground.

 Take fire , sacred Samhain ash.

 The holy day is upon us.With darkened stars on holy ground.

 INFO: SAHMAIN was the Gaelic celebration for the end of the harvest year.  (About 2000 years ago. ) It's from this that we get Halloween. There were no devils, or black cats or witches. The townspeople would gather together and dress in animal hides and have a bonfire  before the season changed yet again. . It also signified the honouring of the dead who had gone before. It was believed  souls rose to walk the earth to make mischief, before returning to their graves. The next day became known as All Saints' Day. The next day the people would gather fire from the bonfire ashes to light their own fires. And the year would start again. 

Photographs 2019  BOOOOOOOOOO.......

Autumn by John Clare

 AUTUMN by John Clare (1793-1864) 
     A romantic  poet who loved the natural world, and loved to write about the details he saw all around him.......

 The thistledown’s flying, though the winds are all still,

 On the green grass now lying, now mounting the hill,

 The spring from the fountain now boils like a pot;

 Through stones past the counting it bubbles red-hot.

 The ground parched and cracked ...........

 is like overbaked bread,

 The greensward all wracked is, 

 bents dried up and dead.

 The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,

 And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.

 Hill-tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,

 And the rivers we’re eying burn to gold as they run;

 Burning hot is the ground, 

  liquid gold is the air;

 Whoever looks round ....................

 sees Eternity there.

 PHOTOGRAPHS 2019

BEAUTEOUS THINGS

 "Beauty is the highest of all these influences. wakens spiritual emotion in the mind of man...." 
                    -Robert Bridges (Testament of Beauty 1929)

 I LOVE ALL BEAUTEOUS THINGS by Robert Bridges
                                                             (1844-1930)

 I love all beauteous things

 I seek and adore them

 God hath no better praise

 And man in his hasty days

 Is honoured for them

 I too will something make

 And joy in the making

 Although tomorrow it seem

 Like the empty words of a dream

 Remembered on waking

  Bridges almost became a minister at one point, but decided he wanted to be a doctor more. One of his children, Elizabeth Daryush, became a poet.

 He wrote  sobering  poems during and after WW1, after his son was severely wounded. He was working on a piece called "Testament to Beauty", 1924. 

 In 1926 his daughter , Margaret. died, then he completed the work, all the time finding it eased his broken heart..

  It was published Oct 1929, six months before he died.

 Photographs  Fall 2019  
    "I love all Beauteous Things from 1001 Beautiful Things 1944 edition" This has also been set to a Hymn and was sung for the Queen's 90th birthday celebratation.