In the Dark

The Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere takes place tomorrow, on Saturday June 21 2025, at 02:42 UTC (03:42am local Irish Time). In advance of the big event I thought I’d share this poem I found online, which seems appropriate to the occasion.

No one knows what calls us, days like this
that seem to stretch all sense of reason:
the hillside scrub abuzz with silver-washed

and dark green fritillary, the red grouse
and hare, a lone buzzard counterpoised
on the breeze overhead, near motionless,

weighing the balance of each warm
and distant heartbeat. And who would
claim the old gods dead when the sudden

cadence of your breath slips to the sound
of something pulsing through from the far side
of the ridge, neither ghost nor glossolalia

but wholly of the earth, like the hum
that guided you through summer nights
in childhood when you found yourself alone,

and a field too far from home, as the light
began to fade. Sometimes what we love
is the incongruity of things: the latent sense

of having been here yet having never been
before, that strangely familiar clutch of stones,
how every shadow beckons with a promise

of safekeeping. If, as someone said,
it’s true that the souls to match our souls
lie patiently in wait to take our places

when we step aside, then we should lower
our sights from the brilliance of the sky
and down towards this aperture of darkness.

To enter the tomb is to enter the one world
we know, the cool walls of the passage
summoning us forth with the chance hope

of an earthly meeting. Alone, you are
not alone, the carved stone appears to say.
Nothing is eternal, and everything remains.

by Tarn MacArthur

This entry was posted on June 20, 2025 at 10:09 am and is filed under Poetry with tags Seefin Passage Tomb, Summer Solstice, Tarn MacArthur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.