Beltane, by Megli
It began to get dark as she and I pushed on into the wood, a soft dusk-mist greying the wash of bluebells. Hazel and sweet-chestnut trunks were very black under a roof of green. A great tit swung his unchanging two notes out over the twilight, as though skimming stones on the surface of a lake. In the distance, we could hear the snarl and scrape of motorbikes being raced through the woodshave down by the estate.
We came into a small, bowl-sided dell, with a path of beaten black mud leading through it. Oaks antlered the slopes, standing two abreast. We stood very still, sensing which way we should go, into the blue. The grey gauzes of the woodland thickened, and night seeped in between the trees.
We climbed the side of the dell and sheltered on its lip. It was nearly dark, and the two of us, old friends, went like blind people in a familiar house, navigating by touch and instinct. I took out the provisions, the honey, the spiced wine and bread. She gathered a creel of sticks and laid them down.
With blowings and fannings, I lit a fire, humming to the anvil-breasted mother of flame, with her snakes and her spring-waters, riding her red mare, the old darling of the poets. My dear friend sat gravely, looking out over the dingle, as the twigs snapped and charred and the smoke sought us out, each in turn. We washed our faces in the smoke of the wood, floating soft and grey as clouds of moths.
I tipped some grains of frankincense into my hand, and sprinkled them onto the charcoal blog snug in its socket of flint. Sweet-sharp incense rose, mingled with woodsmoke. The hot, holy spice blended with smoke and sap and wild garlic: fragrance of earth ingrained with light.
A long silence, as we sat side by side, in perfect and precious companionship. I let my mind drift through the forest, touching and smelling and tasting...slim, swan-necked birches, smooth sweet-chestnuts, hornbeam all atangle, the furrowed wizard oak. All grow here, their feet washed in bluebells and the curling waves of fern. Together, we breathed ourselves into the note of the wood, its unheard music. I raised my voice in a line of melody, sinuous and Persian, unspooling my song out between the trees.
I began.
- Our subject, tonight, is Love.
- For I can think of no better thing to speak of this night, and every night, until we die, she replied.
- For what is the dark earth beneath our feet than the flesh of the heart in which Love roots? And what is the incense but the perfume of the Beloved, whose sweetness points beyond itself to the sweeter scent of nothingness?
- And what is the fire but the blaze of the heart, that burns itself up in Love, and is consumed?
A longer silence, broken by the chirr of the night-birds. She took the bread and lifted the turned beechwood bowl filled with honeycomb. The wind through the coppice swayed the slender trunks like shaken sedge.
I took the wine, spiced with honey and crushed herbs, rosemary for the sun, cool mint for the sting of contrast, to offer up and to dip the warm breadcrusts in.
My friend blessed the bread, asking that our coming and our going alike be made sacred. We took turns to dip the bread in the honey, and placed it in the fire as an offering. The honey sizzled and charred with a sweet smell.
- Old Adam in the greenwood, I said. Atavistic and ancient, his mouth spews leaves and tendrils, green-smeared, his flesh is of grass. Do you catch the uncured tang of his bullhide and the acrid crush of the woundwort bruised beneath him, the sanicle and strawberry?
- Are the gods metaphors that are realer than reality? I think that they haunt this place, and savour it, and in their savouring it comes to be.
I blessed the wine, pouring it into the chipped green bowl. I lifted it and poured a good cupful into the dark soil as an offering to the mother of the place, the Lady of the Wood, beech-shanked, oakleaf-skinned in her dazzle of shadow. My friend took the cup, and I looked at her as she shut her eyes and drank the spiced wine in the yellow firelight beneath the oak.
Wild garlic and the wood anemone
under the rain. In the blue dusk
the wet, white-starred earth rebukes
the heavens for their starlessness.
The toad-faced nightjar
lies hid in the thicket,
sharpening the wood with his note.
Some say cities and gallery walls
shelter the most beautiful sights
upon dark earth: but I say
it is the fall of your hair
against a frieze of birches.
