Samhuinn I imagine in the fire’s flames those sepia or line drawn faces distorted by time, anamorphic, called from forgotten places to whisper through the hot smoke and tousle our soot-flecked hair to remind us of our inheritance in faint voices lingering there. The great tribe gathers to celebrate some long forgotten rite: the saining of the precious hearth, an offering to the night, or the mumming and the guising, parading the scapegoat’s head, praying to sacred ancestors and conversing with the dead. But these are more enlightened times: and the worship of ancient bones is marked with Coke and hot dogs and messaging on phones and a smug new generation who know what they are worth and children sucking plastic pap who sacrifice the earth. Yet the embers of tradition still lie within the ashes: we still have time to say a prayer before the whole world crashes, before our fire is starved of life and in that dying light we are drawn towards the darkness and everlasting night. We sleep again, and hope to wake and find the nightmare’s gone, and once again we have a world to build our dreams upon - but that depends on being a tribe relying on each other, who live content with what they have and respect the earth, their mother.
Jeff Gallagher’s poems feature in Rialto, Acumen, The High Window and The Journal among others. He has had numerous plays published and performed nationwide. He was the winner of the Carr Webber Prize 2021. For many years he taught English and Latin. He also appeared (briefly) in an Oscar-winning movie.
Amethyst Review 