A Dream of Solstice – Sun of Spring

Christmas and the Winter Solstice have their own fascination in Ireland. Mother Earth is moving us irresistibly towards Spring Equinox and a new summer. See what Aglae & Walter lived in 2011 (click here)

Man & women and children – all human beings take delight in Mother Nature. And in the words of Irish poet Seamus Heaney this delight is leading us to solstice at the Irish passage tombs – here it’s Newgrange.

Here is the Original of Seamus Heaney’s poem

A Dream of Solstice

Qual e colui che sognando vede,

 che dopo  ‚l sogno la passione impressa

rimane, e l’altro a la mente non riede, 

cotal son io  …                                           

Dante, Paradiso, Canto 33

 

Like somebody who sees things when he’s dreaming

and after the dream lives with the aftermath

of what he felt, no other trace remaining,

 

so I live now, for what I saw dearts

and is almost lost, although a distilled sweetness

still drops from it into my inner heart.

 

It is same with snow the sun releases,

the same as when in wind, the hurried leaves

swirl round your ankles and the shaking hedges

 

that had flopped their catkin cuff-lace and green sleeves

are sleet-whipped bare. Dawn light began stealing

through the cold universe to county Meath,

 

over weirs where the river Boyne goes curling

imperturbably, over standing stones

millennia deep in their own unmoving

 

and unmoved alignment. And now the planet turns

its clay-cold brow as a watching crowd stands still

in the wired-off precinct of the burial mounds,

 

Flight 104 from New York audible

as it descends on schedule into Dublin,

the car park silent, assembled people

 

waiting for seedling light on roof and windscreen,

for the addled sun to riddle through the murk

and overboiling cloud, for a milted glow

 

and eastern dazzle

to send first light like share-shine in a furrow

steadily deeper, farther available,

 

creeping along the floor of the passage grave

to backstone and capstone, holding its candle

to the world inside the astronomic cave.

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney, published in „A Meath Anthology“, by Tom French and Patrick Duffy
(This poetry volume has been given to Walter & Aglae by  Co Meath County Council at their recent visit in Navan, Trim and Tara)