Lying on the floor listening to music in between drawing belladonna on my walls, I no-faced up a bunch of poems yesterday. Here are two of them…and a third (a repost) from which they are a continuation on the same theme.
Pear Tree contains a direct quote from on of Seamus Heaney’s bog-body poems (‘soft moraines’ and ‘thighs’ being the first and last words of a particular stanza in Bog Queen.)
I’ve never been a blue calm sea. I’ve always been a storm
~ Stevie Nicks.
~ Saoirse.
It’s great how things come together sometimes. When a combination of planning plus serendipity collides to make something really *work*, it’s deeply gratifying. That’s how Lá Bealtaine was this year.
First in the new house. It is my habit most years to make a flower crown in May Day colours (yellow and white) for the day itself and then dry it out and hang it on my wall somewhere. The number of crowns grows as the years pass. Intentionally, however, I did not bring any of the flower crowns from the old apartment into the new house. So this year, the first crown has now officially been made, used in art, used in collective spellwork, and is drying in preparation to take it’s place on a fresh new wall.
I have been going through a really…interesting… time lately with old baggage and insecurity. It’s a good thing I’m a witch who knows how to eat their old skins. I’ve been reading the cards (and asking friends) repeated questions over and over, from different angles… really trying to go the distance with a few snags in the ball of twine that is my life. Pull on one thing, find it loops back to a shadow wiggling behind you, journal about it, cry about it (a LOT), feel it begin to process, rinse, repeat. I am aware that having the good fortune to finally feel safe in my living environment has provided the perfect setting for this kind of work – it’s in the safety and quiet that you finally realise… it’s just you now, bitch. Do you even KNOW how to be happy!?
The answer is yes…or more accurately, that I can learn. If there’s one thing I KNOW I’m good at, it’s learning…and beginning to learn… and beginning to begin.
So May Day. Full moon. Time to let some shit go. Also the first day of my period such as it exists. Other than emotional dysregulation (grrrreat), my chief symptom is swelling… waxing full and round just like the fucking moon. Good for shadow work though. And I guess it means I’m sloughing more than just metaphors…
I went a bit quiet in the days preceding. Journaling, reading cards, squirming at the answers, and resting. Then May Day came and despite the swelling, I wore all cream and white. All handmade. Two petticoats with lace trim. A handmade corded bust support based on the top half of the famous Symington “Pretty Housemaid” pattern. A corset cover inspired camisole made from the same wide lace trim that’s gathered into the hem of one of my petticoats. I had intentionally left my hair unwashed (but *not* uncleaned or untended) for over a month (May Day was day 35) and my roots were growing in like crazy (half an inch in a single month! weee!!!). Then I attended Mixtress Rae’s radio show to dance with my shadows and expel evil. I took part in a planned collective spell she lead during the show – 5 people working the spell including me, I think… across 3 continents. She followed up the spell with Kate Bush’s “Get Out of My House” which was very cathartic and effective.
I took all of this very seriously (amidst the joy of dancing and so on). I mulled my readings over and did follow up readings through the course of the weekend. I also finally fully washed and re-henna’d my hair. I haven’t used shampoo or conditioner in 3 years… or anything soap-like on my hair in 2.5 years… what I use varies a little but it’s mainly a hand-prepared clay mixture followed by a diluted vinegar wash about once a month at the moment. I like that I have to pay attention to it. I followed this up with some ‘home-spa’ style care. It was good. Medicinal. Needed.
I’m not done processing things, of course. Who is? Ever? But this is ultimately what witchcraft is about for me… I’m grateful to have it. None of it’s my first rodeo but *that* feels pretty fucking cool!
~Saoirse.
Sitting in my weedy lair, thinking over creative ambition, doors between worlds, and the way witchcraft works wonders – staring out at blackbirds, hooded crows (and a wren!) flitting between drifting spells of rain – I finally finished two poems.
The first, paradoxically, took over a month.
The second was a classic case of how most of my poems emerge… “No-facing” them up from the gut and barfing them all over the page like so much ectoplasm.
The winter weather continues but I’m not sad about it. On Imbolc, I went for a river-side walk for several hours. Starting in the morning mist and ending in the midday sun through fields and several different woods, my partner and I saw two grey herons fly overhead with sticks in their beaks. The Cailleach gathers firewood! Six more weeks of winter. As it happened, we also saw their nesting place: five full grown grey herons perched in the tree tops overhanging the edge of the river… uncanny in their beauty.
~ Saoirse.
(Decks shown: “Trionfi della Luna (Paradoxical)” – 3 of Coins, Knight of Wands, 2 of Coins – and “Oracle médiéval et merveilleux” – “Colère” – in inverted blacklight)
PS. A personal reminder, “Eviscerate” by Faetooth playing as I post this <3
Love poems are undoubtedly the hardest for me to write. I have composed only a handful that I consider successful in my life time. Here are three of those, all about the same person ^_^ You may note the ‘marriage’ of medieval mysticism and Pagan Otherworlds.
Poetry is such a meandering thing. I can’t say I’m the sort who works on the art of writing poetry or who reads widely or consistently to better acquaint myself with the source material… at least, I don’t do this with the kind of structure or consistency that makes sense to declare anywhere on the internet! But I care very intensely about developing a style, voice, and a sensory reality.
My sister writes BEAUTIFUL poetry that is much like her dreams – often in the style of epic narrative. With a temporal flow and an arc of completion. She once pointed out that my poetry evokes vignettes of mood and sensory experience. A window into a brief mystical moment. This is incidentally also very much like my dreams (albeit with the added potential for positivity since my dreams are almost exclusively terrible & terrifying… horrific, gothic, sublime.)
I am firmly of the view that poetry should be read aloud. At least, MINE should be… with breaks (or ‘rests’?) only as dictated by punctuation, rather than (GASP! HORROR!) at the end of every line. If you take into consideration that much of what I’ve written has included direct musical reference (in addition to those that can already be achieved through metre and so on), you may see that I *try* to extend the audio-visual to include music and dance.
Thus, in the poem “Untitled (Hazel for a Boy)” the hazel in the palm is a reference to the writings of Julian of Norwich on the nature of love… and I have layered this with a common trad descriptor of young beloveds: (nut) brown boy/girl. One long standing favourite of mine is “Ille Dhuinn, S’ Toigh Leam Thu”
The Scottish Gaelic lyrics are as follows:
’Ille dhuinn, ’s toigh leam thu,
’S toigh leam fhìn thu, laochain;
Mas toigh leat mi, is toigh leam thu ‑
’S gur òg a thug mi gaol dhut.
Dh’fhalbh mi mar a b’ àbhaist dhomh
Air sàillibh coimhead chaorach ‑
’S beag a bha dhem fhor orra,
’S mo leannan air a’ chaolas.
Nuair dhìrich mi suas Criongrabhal,
’S e m’ inntinn nach robh aotrom ‑
Bha ’m bàta mach gu Saighdeanais,
’S i toidhdidh fo cuid aodaich.
’S ann a their mo phàrantan
Gur tàmailt leotha m’ fhaoineas ‑
Gum faighinn fear na b’ fheàrr na thu
Le bàtaichean ’s le birlinn.
Ged gheibhinn fear na b’ fheàrr na thu
Le bàtaichean ’s le birlinn,
Gum b’ fheàrr leam fhìn an gille donn
Is e gun bhonn dhen t‑saoghal.
Ged gheall mi dhut gun leanainn thu
’S gun dealaichinn ri mo dhaoine,
Cha d’ rachainn dha Na Hearadh leat
Air cheannachd air an t‑saoghal.
Ged a bhithinn pòsta riut
Is còir agam air d’ fhaotainn,
Cha b’ fhada bhithinn beò agad
’S an Dòmhnallach às m’ aonais.
In English:
Brown-haired lad, I’m fond of you,
I’m really fond of you, boy;
If you’re fond of me, I’m fond of you-
I’ve loved you since I was young.
I set off as usual
to look for the sheep
but scant attention gave I to them,
knowing my beloved was in the strait.
When I climbed Criongrabhal,
my spirits were low –
the ship, with well-trimmed sails,
was out near Saighdeanais.
My parents say that
my foolishness is a source of shame to them –
that I could attract a better man than you,
an owner of ships and galleys.
Though I could have a better man than you,
an owner of ships and galleys,
I would much prefer the brown-haired lad
though he hadn’t a penny in the world.
Though I promised you I’d follow you
and part company from my people,
nothing in the world
could induce me to go to Harris.
I wouldn’t survive long if married to you,
while pining for MacDonald.
Note that in Scottish Gaelic as well as in Irish the manner of describing hair colour is to pair the colour with the type of person directly, e.g. brown boy. The translation above opts for the “brown-haired” descriptor to make it clearer in English.
There are many other examples of songs that make reference to a nut-brown colour (many of which are super cringe tourist favourites here in Ireland) but this is the one that I have most often in mind due to it’s melancholy sound and its emphasis on the difficulties of separation and limited finances. Having formed and kept a bond across the Atlantic … between worlds, over nine waves, across time and space… lends itself quite well to the shared lore of our relationship. Indeed, this kind of poetic layering also lends itself to the spellbound witchy otherworldly quality of being fascinated and devoted to any human person other than myself. <3
Another such colour symbol, of course, is the azure blue… the medieval link with lapiz lazuli and text illuminations. Or the blue-grey/blue green (glás!) of the sea. The list goes ever on and on.
To my chosen person: “I have walked the world to find you. I’ve worn out the soles of three pairs of iron shoes and my hair is no longer red. But I come to claim you…”*
~ Saoirse.
*From “Hans, My Hedgehog” in Jim Henson’s The Storyteller
I have been working on categorising my poetry. I knew there were a few themes that, in general, a lot of my poetry might fall under… but I have spent the last week or so slowly charting, dating, accounting for and making sure I had back ups of my poetry and the first realisation that came out of this is that I have written over 70 poems since the beginning of 2021.
There are almost no poems before that until you travel back about 10 years.
Turns out field-working autistic burnout and shuffling personal care away from heavily medicated *misdiagnoses* brings the poet back out in a person… but I digress.
What is challenging about assigning organised and uniform categories to my poetry is that, of course, there is organic overlap. This is precisely what it is to be an archivist (i.e. why we don’t rearrange physically what we categorise intellectually) …Or if I were to try and write up a descriptive summary of each poem and derive collection schema from there… THAT would be more like the work of a rare books librarian wrangling unique/historic items into DCRM(B) and MARC-XML friendly formats.
…I digressed again.
The point is, it’s tough but I LOVE doing this sort of thing… ad infinitum, it seems.
Here is a pie chart I have constructed and colour-coded to represent the themes and distribution of my poetry as of right now. Representing 71 poems written between January 9th, 2021 and October 15th, 2024. (I’ve written a few more but for various reasons they are not included on this list.)
(Interestingly, there are a few I cannot find copies of though I know I at least have physical copies somewhere. Bad LIS-professional! No cookie!!!)
The colours are loosely significant but the important thing to absorb here is that a) poetry is one of the main ways I channel my anger… especially as an autistic who goes largely non-verbal under social/interpersonal duress and b) I actually think of the Tower Quartet and (Channeled) Anger as subsets of a larger intellectual fonds …which is called “Excavations”. You will see that title in the pie chart as pertaining to a single slice, but really you can also view “Excavations” more broadly as occupying just over 45% of the chart! …The unifying emphasis is on digging deep, getting into the chthonic, and shadow-working my shit… oh, and a little revenge poetry here and there.
The thematics in the rest equally relate to each other pretty intensely. My poetry is always devotional in nature but some poems are more direct forms of near-audible gnosis. This makes sense to me from a mythic perspective as it is (personally) derived from the function of verse, alliteration, sorcery, ‘supplication’, evocation, and so on in medieval Irish literature.
I have made “Death” green mainly to evoke a #deathpositive association – ‘verdure from void’. I could equally (and perhaps should) have made it some kind of gold colour:
“I know you’ll remember me when I’m gone
remember my stories, remember my songs
I’ll leave them on earth, sweet traces of gold
oh, they’re calling me home, they’re calling me home.”
~ “They’re Calling Me Home”, Rhiannon Giddens
I will likely include little blurbs illuminating each category on a basic level whenever I manage to post them.
At any rate, I still need to figure out how to create a poetry gallery where poems that can’t occupy a single slide might appear… Until then, here are some of the poems I’ve written in September and October (minus “Athame”… which I have posted already.)
I suppose this set is all rather on the nose, but the themes of each are as follows: Love, Excavation, Death, Anger, and Anger.
For what it’s worth, I guess.
~ Saoirse.
* Get it? Theme-attics and Scheme-attics? Because it’s a post about poetry thematics and schematics? And I have a thing for sad attics? Ba-dum-tssshhh!!! Genius at it’s finest. I kill me.
[CW – there will be reference to symptoms of trauma but I will not discuss details nor will I indicate any specific type of experience other than to discuss how it affects my magico-spiritual process.]
Half moon this morning. Waxing gibbous. Serendipitously, this is the card I received in a single draw from the Pagan Otherworlds Tarot. How apt.
I have been posting a bit more openly about music lately. Mostly here on the blog. I want to talk a little more specifically about why this – for me – constitutes witchcraft and deep magical healing work.
If anyone wants a recommendation for an amazing young musician and singer coming out of the American ‘Old Timey’ Trad world (as distinct from modern bluegrass!) they should check out Nora Brown. Holy shit her work is good. She’s currently collaborating with a fiddler named Stephanie Coleman and equally her style is deep, rhythmic, and rooted.
I’ve known of Nora Brown for a few years now but yesterday I made an attempt to watch the Tiny Desk concert above. I say ‘attempt’ because by the time they started into ‘The Old Blue Bonnet’ I was shaking, hyperventilating and so on. Having too many visceral and deeply loved memories of American-specific experiences… looking up at the moon through pine needles… fireglow shining through a cabin window at the bottom of a mountain valley… a small trickling stream beneath my feet… elk in the morning, bears on a walk. The music of the unassuming – jeans and t-shirts – trading information, laughing, and the deep heartbeat of boots on a floor keeping the tunes flowing. People talking with their feet and singing with their hands…
I couldn’t do it yesterday.
I told my partner it felt like a world had vanished but that I (and only I among anyone I know now) could hear faint echoes of it calling out “Goodbye! Goodbye!”*
So today is the half moon and I drew the half moon card. To me, the card says ‘Now you can do it and I will help.’ I took slooooow breaths, clutching the deck (my bridge between worlds), listened to this gem of a video and let what once was run its course through the channel of my emotions. Tears again but more manageable this time.
It is, of course, not at all accidental that so much of American trad songs are fixated on war, death, loss, poverty, jail time, labour, loneliness. (The backbone of the ‘American dream’?) When people move too fast over land that isn’t theirs their own pre-existing problems grow with them. I don’t find much to ‘redeem’ about this… but I do find subtlety and nuance, I guess. The tunes I like the most have the least pretense – they’re tunes by and for flawed people. Maybe even the damned (depending on your worldview… I use demonic imagery in my witchcraft for many reasons). They carry no false promises and their dogma sounds tired.
I don’t know if I will ever use my violin for fiddle music again… I have no idea how that would feel in the body. Playing music, by definition, replicates the movements and bodily experiences of the past. That’s what practice IS… taking what you have already done and keeping it alive. Maybe that’s what makes it so hard and so rewarding at once. I am comforted by the knowledge I have of different forms of music and the fact that deep down I am fortunate to have some access to those skills and worlds… but I tend to feel shattered by the awareness that I come from a world in which I did not fit and I live now in a world that doesn’t know about any of that – at all. And I still do not fit.
This, incidentally, is how trad music is formed. Traditions carried. Stories retold and reworked. Sources cited (as is done so amazingly in the Tiny Desk video!)
To be a witch for me (among many other things) is to go to the altar and lay my music at Her feet. To carve a space that is mine… with bits and bobs of my story – the stuff that makes me howl and cry; the stuff that makes me dance; and the stuff that I know emerges syncretic and flawed… and to let it emerge and take its new form anyway. I take it all with me. These things are in my satchel. It’s painful to perceive, now, that no one around me knows it. I’m a person with no context. It must be enough that I know it.
The half moon will help me see that and shift my perspective back towards joy. And, I’m not totally alone… I can still light a bonfire on occasion and surround myself with other music makers. I know I’ve left things behind for a reason and I guess I’ll keep the practice of fitting into nowhere at all. Chronically transatlantic like so many before me… but hopefully reckoning a bit better with empathy and collective responsibility!
Below, a couple poems I wrote a few years ago, during an earlier phase of processing these things:
This one (from 2021 or earlier… can’t remember) makes reference to two songs, “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie” ** (performed by Bruce Molsky) and “I Lost Something in the Hills” by Sibylle Baier.
The Morrígan often ‘speaks’ to me through verse (UPG) and the following poem felt like an answer to wondering if she was there ‘even then’.
From 2022, it makes reference to John Prine as well as “Blackbird” performed by the Lonesome Sisters (written by Debra Clifford about her mother… Debra herself passed away in 2022.)
~ Saoirse.
* Rayna Gellert*** has composed some great songs out of this tradition that capture many of these feelings for me – “Strike the Bells” from her album ‘Workin’s Too Hard’ and “Nothing” from her album ‘Old Light: Songs from my Childhood and Other Gone Worlds’ come immediately to mind. Whew!
** This link is to a live performance (including the only mistake I’ve ever heard him make! ^_^) This is important firstly because I think his live renditions have a more dirge-like quality than his recorded version (which is on his album ‘Soon Be Time’) and secondly because he performed this song live for the first time one night at my college (a few years after I had stopped going to the mountains each summer to a camp where he and others taught) … I was talking to him after the gig and he asked me how the tune came across. I told him it was beautiful and made me cry and he told me it was the first time he’d done it on stage!!!
*** Incidentally, the same summer location was where I first had the privilege of meeting Dan Gellert, Rayna’s father. Holy shit that man can play and on the most gorgeous fretless banjo to boot!
I would love to hear your responses, thoughts, etc. in the comments. But please note, I’m not soliciting for comfort or validation. I’m wary of encouraging what I so often interpret in comments as codependent language. I’m fine! I am me and you are you. Concepts & practices such as witchcraft are shared but also truly individual – this is what makes them so potent! 🙂
I wanted to share some recent moments of simple joy & presence. These photographs were not necessarily taken for the purpose of sharing in a public format. However, I am in the habit of taking constant photos of brambles, for example… Such photos in turn make up a good back catalogue of plant/animal material to from which to practice drawing**, to practice seeing, and to practice layering concepts.
Whether something gets shared or not is rarely planned (at least rarely planned fully) and the follow-through on any such plans also rarely correlates to the intent in taking the photograph. It’s all a bit loosey goosey up in here.
For me, it has become increasingly clear that the intent to share (or not?) is not so binary… Thus, some recent moments of craft, joy, & sensory immersion.
For some context on what I’m doing with the header image, you might like to watch this video of mine on The Hush Tarot & it’s references to Arthur Rackham/the Golden Age of Illustration:
~ Saoirse
* A reference to the highly influential (1970s) art historical work of the same name by John Berger. You can watch it for free here. I’ve actually not watched all of it myself yet but the significance of this was two fold – to challenge what was up to that point a more traditionalist method of interpreting art historical work & to introduce the viewing audience to ways of questioning & analysing the art they take in or experience.
** The header image is a composite of my own photography of birch trees and a print I own of “The Fairy Tightrope”/”Fairy Dancing on a Spiderweb” by Arthur Rackham. You can see an early version of this image in a 1912(?) copy for free from the New York Public Library here. I guess you can also be glad I’m not sharing my photographs of dead rats and such 😛
*** Check out the album Child Ballads by Anaïs Mitchell & Jefferson Hamer. It has a *gorgeous* version of Tam Lin that keeps the pregnancy/poison narrative in! …I mean, check out Anaïs Mitchell in general ::drool::
Hello there… a poem conceived ‘of an evening’ in the aftermath of a maddening supermoon in early autumn. Shall we play a game of ‘wake the dead’?
I’d say most of my poetry arises from attempting to describe the place where sensory detail and cognition meet… but please think of this however you choose!
~ Sorsha.
*The title is from Tom Waits lyrics to “No one knows I’m gone”.
*Deck featured in header image ~ Trionfi della Luna (Paradoxical)