Spring Poems - by Sophie Strand
(All Images used by Gordon Mortensen)
Beltaine approaches and the floral exclamations begin to overlap until the air is loud, loud, loud with scent, color, pollen.
Sending magic to all of you. I’m facing some really scary health news right now but I am getting a lot of juice and joy and magic from watching the world wake up green tendril by green tendril. Here are some old poems from chapbooks of mine I hope to someday republish.
Beltaine
They jumped through the fire, it is said.
Were wed. His arms, oak-twisted, fastened
to her fields. Her blue rose erupted in his
glen. And the cows were chased between
twin pyres of smoke, became smoke, became
bread and breath and light. Behind the hedge,
my great-grandmother whistled shy as blue,
stung and dark as night, the song of the nightingale.
Until a boy, entranced, felt velvet nubs bloom
on his head, used new horns to pierce the bramble
boundary of his beloved.
My blood is seas of space, handfuls of moon,
from the fires of my grandmother’s mother.
The spark I kindle on a hilltop solitary,
the wood wrong, the smoke yellow as pain.
When will the handfasting ceremony
commence? When will the stag charge from
the pines? Come to answer my
– “Is it time?” with: It is time.
Am I breaking with the past? Is the past
so brittle it can break? How can I know?
This time, I jump through the fire alone.
I do not wed a man, I wed a place. Surface
through the smoke, mountain-born, naked
as a star. Finally whole.
ncG1vNJzZmirn6W1qrHSramappRjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89oqqmqmaO0brzOnqSs