Solstice
When the soggy Spring has ended,
And the sun is riding high,
And the Summer King’s a father
With no clue he’s soon to die,
Then the people of the Rede
Take a rest from daily toil
To laugh and dance and run bare feet
Through briefly sacred soil.
The May Queen’s now a Mother;
The Yule Queen’s now the Crone;
And last year’s May Queen is reborn
And waits year’s end to claim her own.
The planting is well ended,
And the harvest’s far away;
There’s no war on the horizon
To spoil a poor man’s day.
Spend a moment in the moment
Underneath the summer sky
And dream of endless summer
While the sun is riding high.
Paul Haynie
6/21/2001
Notes:
This one was completed on the day, and is the most purely Wiccan poem in the cycle, though of course it plays off of my own take on the Wiccan view of the cycle. That is, I had to play with it until it balanced; I came up with the following:
There is the three-in-one goddess, one person in three bodies, Maiden/Mother/Crone, and two distinct gods, the Holly/ Summer King and the Oak/ Winter King. The Holly King is born at Yule, (Maiden becomes Mother, Mother becomes Crone, Crone is reborn as Maiden), grows to adulthood, kills the Oak King at the Equinox, mates with the Maiden and conceives the next Oak King at Beltane. The Oak King is born at the summer solstice, (Maiden becomes Mother, Mother becomes Crone, Crone is reborn as Maiden), grows to adulthood, kills The Holly King at the Equinox, mates with the Maiden and conceives the next Holly King at Samhain. This makes it a perfectly symmetrical two thread cycle interwoven with a symmetrical three thread cycle, which is the sort of thing that the ancient Celts really cared about.
Uncle Hyena