A poem about remembering loved ones who have died

Samhain
by Linnea Johnson

Just as day begins in night, in Samhain’s veiled dark,
this night opens a portal in my chest, opens shiny,
jeweled doors encrusted with rubies, faceted emeralds,
and sapphires catching what glimmery light

there is within this dark. I hear a tumult of vague
pearly voices, soft with sweet sorrows. Tin doors
are this dark, end nights portal in. Feels so good

to have everyone home at heart, all whooping it up
and telling stories – mama, daddy, all my friends who
have died, so many at hearth in me, though

Bo circles my head like a trickster bee goddess,
whispery, peripatetic, flitting, staying outside,
glossing everyone in turn. She is a noise, a voice
I hear but do not understand, but want with me
and miss when I do not hear her. Stay, I ask,
but she does not.

Just as day begins at night, a whisperer soughs
tonight’s October wind murmuring an answer
to a question who has not asked, saying

that where I will be after I die
is where I was before I was born

– like an apple seed, maybe, buried in dark, rich
soil, fire, or deep ash. Maybe as moonlight’s ripple,
or candlelight evanescent on the silk skin of still water.
Maybe as a bubble of breath in rushing water, rilling
rocks, sundering silence. Inside, perhaps, the hearty
heart heart of a loved one, as now I am so filled
with such light and song and dark.

Tonight too, and as if a breath finds my cheek, the chill
lobe of an ear, I remember living among a brew of women
who celebrated these seasons, these turnings
of the wheel of the year. Then as before, and now,

Samhain is my favorite day, me painting ‘Snyder’ onto a smooth
stone, putting her down by a favorite tree, lighting a candle
for her passing, for her life, for her light burbling in my chest,
marking the beginning end of an old new cycle.

‘Viola’ I painted onto another smooth stone, gray as dusk,
it’s twin stone reading ‘Mama,’ oh, Mama, calling out “Mama”
as the night deepened, the veil thinned, her face and others’
shadowing the moon simmering in the night sky,
or forming letters on an oak leaf, or a signature in runes
birch twigs spelled out, all and everyone content
in the ascendancy of the dark,

the end of new things, of old lives lived new away from the living,
inchoate, living with the dead, as the dead, knowing that all life
eats the delicious dead – as communion, as bread, as turned dirt
as the sweetness in beets and memory, apricots, and pomegranates.

Samhain, too, calls in the first days of winter, all barley, rye,
turnips, and apples harvested, gathered in, or they’d better be,

The faeries’ breath in the fields and orchards ready to freeze
any and all lingering behind in grasses, trees, and bushes.

At Samhain, too, women sing their cattle and sheep down from
hillsides into this sighing shelter of barn and byre, harvested feed
thick in thatched ricks. Life destined for slaughter is offered first to
what gods there be, then to the knife, then to the stomach and larder.
Peat and wood for winter fires is stacked at the hearth. Then
commences fires and prayers, baking, and the salting of meat.

At Samhain, chest open to hearth, to heart, let us celebrate
those who dance the heart as if it were a bonfire. Let us celebrate
what is and is not before us. Tonight, let us celebrate Samhain fires
and bees, the night, the living and the dead, and all that is not day.