Samhain... All Hallow's Eve Poem by John Tansey

Brisk, this cold October wind,
pruning husks of brown-balled leaves
into effigies of Autumn's wane,
sweeps with besom broom
all the cluttered corners,
and the recessed secrets,
from the hollow's outgrowth,
flushed from the shadows
into the sickle of a quarter moon,
its crisp sheen cold upon the throat.

Fear is unmasked in the witching wind
far from the pranks of tromping children
who dare, amid the leaves, to taunt
with old songs and a cut switch,
the stark, cobwebbed clapboards
of grave side ghosts
loosed upon the world,
to haunt this last slanted sheaf of corn,
stalked by the scythe
in the dread season of the harvest.

Even fire hides from the cold
in the skin of the gourd
on All Hallow's Eve,
its wind prying the brain’s stonehenge -
where death feared by the aging heart
close to the grave
becomes but a game
mimed by mischievious charades
of children, costumed
for their parade of life and death in the park.


(December 5,1993)