A solstice poem

Eyes of the Goddess

From a journey to Newgrange

The poet waits for me in his countryman’s cape

And shows me the map in the gateway stone:

Twin spirals to get you in, and out, of the place of bone;

Wave paths to swim you from shadow to dreamscape;

A stairway of stars for when you are done with earthing.

I am here to practice the art of rebirthing.

She calls me, into the belly of the land that is She.

But I play, like the poet, with the shapes of time:

I am a swimming swan on the River Boyne;

I am a salmon, full with the knowing of the hazel tree;

I wander with Angus, and know the girl I have visioned

in gold at the throat of a white swan, beating pinions.

Drawn by the old perfume of burned bones, I go down

and doze until solstice fire, bright and bountiful

quickens me for the return of the Lady, lithe and beautiful

In the form she has taken, flowing as liquid bronze.

Her face is veiled, so the man-boy called to her side

like the red deer in season will not die in her eyes.

I see beyond the veil, for I come from the Other.

Oh, I yearn for the smell of earth and the kiss of rain!

I leap with her on the hallowed bed, coming again.

She knows the deer-king, as I am child and lover

Her eyes are spiral paths; the gyre of creation whirls

And sends me in green beauty to marry the worlds.

This poem is included in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories. Published by Excelsior Editions/SUNY Press.

photo: Spirals on the kerb stone at Newgrange

A Poem for the Winter Solstice

Eyes of the Goddess

From a journey to Newgrange

The poet waits for me in his countryman’s cape

And shows me the map in the gateway stone:

Twin spirals to get you in, and out, of the place of bone;

Wave paths to swim you from shadow to dreamscape;

A stairway of stars for when you are done with earthing.

I am here to practice the art of rebirthing.

She calls me, into the belly of the land that is She.

But I play, like the poet, with the shapes of time:

I am a swimming swan on the River Boyne;

I am a salmon, full with the knowing of the hazel tree;

I wander with Angus, and know the girl I have visioned

in gold at the throat of a white swan, beating pinions.

Drawn by the old perfume of burned bones, I go down

and doze until solstice fire, bright and bountiful

quickens me for the return of the Lady, lithe and beautiful

In the form she has taken, flowing as liquid bronze.

Her face is veiled, so the man-boy called to her side

like the red deer in season will not die in her eyes.

I see beyond the veil, for I come from the Other.

Oh, I yearn for the smell of earth and the kiss of rain!

I leap with her on the hallowed bed, coming again.

She knows the deer-king, as I am child and lover

Her eyes are spiral paths; the gyre of creation whirls

And sends me in green beauty to marry the worlds.

This poem is included in my collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories. Published by Excelsior Editions/SUNY Press.

Photos: (above) Newgrange at the winter solstice; (below) kerbstone at Newgrange

Spiral path

The spiral turns up in many ways, from the double helix of DNA, to Celtic patterns on a magical dress, to a rickety old wooden spiral staircase in a dream that may become a golden road to the sky.
    One of my favorite ways of embarking on a journey to the Upper World is to picture moving up a spiral staircase. When I returned from a trip to Ireland some thirty years ago, it was the pattern of the double spiral that I had seen on a guardian stone at Newgrange that was the portal for the big night journey that took me to the ancient healer of indigenous American tradition that I call Island Woman.
    The intercoiling serpents of the caduceus are a double spiral; the single serpent coiled around the staff of Asklepios is a single spiral. Surely Jacob's ladder, in the great night vision of Bethel, was a spiral.   
    The spiral turns on the ceiling and walls of the Hypogeum of Malta and spins on great stone screens from the Goddess temple of Taxien.
   "The spiral is the supreme symbol of evolution. Combining cycle and line, it epitomizes entrainment plus change, it replicates an old movement yet drives somewhere new," writes Katya Walter in The Tao of Chaos. "The spiral spins the cosmos together and knits us into being."
     I wrote a poem in which the double spiral as the Eyes of the Goddess, holding the codes of birth and death, creation and dissolution. I wrote it after returning in a visionary journey to the great temple-tomb of Newgrange:

The poet waits for me in his countryman’s cape

And shows me the map in the gateway stone:

Twin spirals to get you in, and out, of the place of bone;

Wave paths to swim you from shadow to dreamscape;

A stairway of stars for when you are done with earthing.

I am here to practice the art of rebirthing. 

     I painted a double spiral on the drum I use to power journeys between the worlds. 

     In our life journeys, it is desirable to put ourselves on the spiral path, so that when life loops back - as it seems to do - to familiar crossroads and challenges - we are not bound to the dumb wheel of repetition, but are able to view a situation we have encountered before from a higher level of awareness, and so make better choices.

The full text of "Eyes of the Goddess" is in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Exclesior Editions/SUNY Press.

Photo: Spiral way in Latvia by RM.

Solstice Poem

-

-

-

--

-

Eyes of the Goddess

From a journey to Newgrange

-

The poet waits for me in his countryman’s cape
And shows me the map in the gateway stone:
Twin spirals to get you in, and out, of the place of bone;
Wave paths to swim you from shadow to dreamscape;
A stairway of stars for when you are done with earthing.
I am here to practice the art of rebirthing.

She calls me, into the belly of the land that is She.
But I play, like the poet, with the shapes of time:
I am a swimming swan on the River Boyne;
I am a salmon, full with the knowing of the hazel tree;
I wander with Angus, and know the girl I have visioned
in gold at the throat of a white swan, beating pinions.

Drawn by the old perfume of burned bones, I go down
and doze until solstice fire, bright and bountiful
quickens me for the return of the Lady, lithe and beautiful
In the form she has taken, flowing as liquid bronze.
Her face is veiled, so the man-boy called to her side
like the red deer in season will not die in her eyes.

I see beyond the veil, for I come from the Other.
Oh, I yearn for the smell of earth and the kiss of rain!
I leap with her on the hallowed bed, coming again.
She knows the deer-king, as I am child and lover
Her eyes are spiral paths; the gyre of creation whirls
And sends me in green beauty to marry the worlds.