Poetry for the Esbat: Blood & Bone Moon 2012

Underworld Guardian Visits with Her Reversal, by Moma.
Is this how they celebrate Samhain? Or is it just the Blood Bone Moon teasing them apart?

Another Samhain season Esbat. The whirligig stops for no one.

Right now, in this Place & rotation, it is not the "Blackberry Moon." The berry season is long over.

Right now, in this Place & rotation, it is not the "Hunter's Moon." All that we hunt has frozen, wilted... returned to rest in the Underground.

Last year, it was very much the Blood Moon & I celebrated it as such. This year, my blood feels dry & crusty beneath my skin. Instead, I feel my bones. I am listening to them. They are dry too. Dry & hard & heavy beneath my skin. They crackle with misgivings.

Today was an uphill battle. Today my bones & my crusty blood cried out, "Let us sleep! We are tired & we are so still so very thirsty." Thirsty for what? I tried my very best to maintain a balance of needs & priorities. I struggled to tend to the children & still make the preparations for this Esbat. I am no longer young enough to delude myself into believing I am invincible. My bones said so.

For weeks now I have considered the poetry for this Esbat. I tried to choose a tarot deck. I tried to choose imagery. I read many poems. This season is a mixed up time for me -- an awkward juxtaposition of death & birth & the celebration of both. The cold & swelling Darkness make for mental lethargy, haphazard melancholy & disagreeable bones. I could not tie things together. I could not think over the creak & clatter of my bones.

I must interject that I am a long-time collector of bones. I live among many. However, I do not show off my bones. Like the gods, they should not be trivialized or flaunted -- they should be heard. I realized very recently that all these years I have spent a great deal of time listening to the bones of other creatures, but rarely, almost never, listening to my own.

I picked the poem for this Esbat whilst listening to my bones.

Last night I still had no tarot card for this Esbat. As I considered the problem, I kept wishing I had a card with bones & the Moon. Instead, a wild hair (or bone?) seized me in the wee hours. Tonight, the Underworld Guardian has a new incarnation... & a Reversal. More bones.

The poem for this Esbat is entitled, "Blue Blood Moon," which, despite its title, has more to do with bones than it does blood. The poem was inspired by the occasion of an October Blue Moon, but I didn't want to wait until October 2020 for the next appropriate Esbat. Besides, my bones had spoken.

This poem might have been written for me, or someone just like me, were it not for the crickets who never play their orchestras here in the Last Frontier. On the other hand, perhaps it was written for the part of me still lingering about in the desert where the crickets hunker down in the basement & play an encore or two. Author Kathleen Kirk reads, writes poetry & blogs "eight days a week." She also wrote the poetry for this Esbat.

BLUE BLOOD MOON*   by Kathleen Kirk

The orchestra was down to its skeleton
crew: crickets, treefrog.

It was cold enough to keep a corpse
fresh, windows closed.

I stepped out to tip my skull back 
on its utmost vertebrae, 

its flexible flicked-off desk-lamp of a neck, to see
what everyone was howling about.

So I don't think I was alone
in being alone.

Blessings to you this Esbat, my friends.


* This poem was originally published in Stirring: A Literary Collection.