Mabon

Autumn is the holiest time of the year

So many people longed for the first budding leaf, and there are boys and girls lined up in black who tell you how much they love that black and dress up their depression in the black lipstick and clove cigarettes,

return to the mouth of the mother with all your fear,

remember why it was that you first came here, lift the knife and trace the secret star, remember how far the journey was to get there

There is a toadstool under a tree, and there are three geese flying ‘cross the lake,

there is a one for the money and a two for the long tall white boys,

and three for the I can’t remember now,

There is a remedy for your pain, there is a magic spell for that, there is a river for that, there is a chanting in the woods for that.

I sat on the floor with the lights turned out, to see what the magic in my head was about,

I lit one candle, took a piece of wood, to see if all my thoughts were good

I lit the incense to someone no one ever sees.

This is the temple of the name, everyone who ever came here stripped off their skin and built it with their bones. This is the tabernacle of the name, everyone who ever came here built it from their blood and lined it with their teeth.

This is the temple of the name

No one ever came here before you

Do not be so fearful of the future thirty years too afraid to embrace

the joy that’s set before you.

Blessed is the day and blessed is the even when the cup of life is set before you

Blessed when you take the earthen chalice, the bowl of stone and blood.

Your mother and your father inherited ages of despair,

now let me teach you how to be happy, now you want to hold his hand,

you know you’re thinking of that man, you know you want to sit in a chair

beside him.

You cannot hide it.

Every day you dive to pain, cutting insane round the fruit to miss its glory

Wholly cut around the rind and taste the sweetness beyond bearing.

I was twenty, now I’m forty, I looked young for twenty years, and now the fall time rolls o’er my body thinning out and making fat, pulling down and pulling in,

so I stood on the summer island that is now beneath the sea where the sun had made the rocks to stink of clams and mussels and of ink.

In my head I said to him, “You were another one of them, You never did appreciate everything people did for you, you never did appreciate it and I wonder if you do now, but I doubt, I won’t make you live without it, but I’m not going to pay”

I will go to the flooded island

I will go to the flooded island in my hat and in my cloak,

I will go to the flooded island.

The other day I went to an island that is now beneath the sea, and as I stood there amidst the clam shells, and the sticks and the debris, I said these dry rocks will be covered any day now

Any day now, any day now

They shall be received by the water

when the waters, when the water takes its autumn toll.