Requiem

And We Danced. Morristown, NJ

ON All Hallows Eve the veil between the living and the dead is said to be the thinnest.  Ancient Celts believed that on Samhain the border between this world and the next was at its thinnest and that spirits could pass from one to the other. I have along been fascinated by the stories and rituals that happen on All  Hallows Eve, as well as cemeteries. Growing up, I used to routinely pass through a cemetery to visit a friend, making the trip several times a week.  The cemetry was the one place in childhood where it was quiet all of the time. That sense of solitude is one I still seek and I wonder if those early years did not shape that need and if making photographs doesn't answer that need.

Longing. Tuscany, Italy

All Hallows

by Louise Glück 

Even now this landscape is assembling.

The hills darken. The oxen

sleep in their blue yoke,

the fields having been

picked clean, the sheaves

bound evenly and piled at the roadside

among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness

of harvest or pestilence.

And the wife leaning out the window

with her hand extended, as in payment,

and the seeds

distinct, gold, calling

Come here

Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

Gates. Tuscany, Italy.

Samhain

by Annie Finch

(The Celtic Halloween)

In the season leaves should love,

since it gives them leave to move

through the wind, towards the ground

they were watching while they hung,

legend says there is a seam

stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil

earth from the sky in one last pale

wave, as autumn dies to bring

winter back, and then the spring,

we who die ourselves can peel

back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.

Tonight at last I feel it shake.      

I feel the nights stretching away

Crosses. Tuscany, Italy.

thousands long behind the days

till they reach the darkness where

all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch

move with me, and when I brush

my own mind across another,

I am with my mother's mother.

Sure as footsteps in my waiting

self, I find her, and she brings

arms that carry answers for me,

intimate, a waiting bounty.

"Carry me." She leaves this trail

through a shudder of the veil,

and leaves, like amber where she stays,

a gift for her perpetual gaze.

 

Mourning. Morristown, NJ