Home before Lughnasadh
Oct. 2nd, 2025 07:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootTen years ago today Dad died.
We learned about it two days later. He died in hospital after being admitted for God knows what. Then he seemed OK so they were going to discharge him, then he died asleep in a hospital bed. Because of the anomaly (if he was well enough to discharge, why did he die?) they had to do an autopsy, and there it was; lung malignancy, COPD, hypertension. He was in his early 70s.
Do I miss him? Not the real him, I don't think. I mythologised him perhaps, aware of the dangers of doing so and yet... there was a magical aspect to him too. I wrote this poem and it became his. I post it here something like every year. Bro wept when I read it out loud and said Dad wasn't worth it. That's true too. And here's the thing; if Mum or Bro die before me, there won't be a single poetic line I can write about them, because they are too stark, too close to the root of me, too real. I get the privileged position I am in, to see all these intersections between worlds and dreams, people trying to get by and the same people as, I don't know, other at the core, but it's a stupid gift really. Doesn't actually do anything.
Anyway, Dad's Song. It's his Scottishness, his Irishness, his anger, his wandering, his imagination. I don't know if it's his homecoming.
DAD'S SONG
At Lughnasadh
I burned them all, my foes
once dancing with the dead
Went up in sparks of faded ire that rose
where once I scratched the doorways of my head
now sunward led
‘Where is the one beloved, the poet’s gold
Where are the songs of all my ancestors
Severed from me, and lost in sea and mire?'
They answered, ‘We are on the hills unknown
And in the bone
left from the funeral pyre
The winds we shake and you
And you we wake
hare-fleet and falcon-eyed beyond the tower
Behold, old Lughnasadh! Your people’s fire!'
None by the white maned sea could track me then
A wanderer by watchtowers unseen
Nor could the sages of the woven lands
unpick the fairy roads by lantern’s gleam
Their tapestries undone by end of day
The changeling way, as in a fever dream.
Marsh bitterns picked my steps through coldling fens
and called me by their piping;
flickering worm
And frostbit moon forlorn
showed me old Grendel
Riding through the dawn
Riddled me silver, never to forget
a stranger’s promise:
‘Home for Lughnasadh
Where your own people light the fires yet!’
I've put this on substack, I don't know why. Playing with it I guessm not sure I'm doing it right but I've really got to get on with dire paperwork. If you want to visit the substack and tell me if it's workingTM here's the link.
https://open.substack.com/pub/smokingboot/p/home-before-lughnasadh?r=1r9jj7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
We learned about it two days later. He died in hospital after being admitted for God knows what. Then he seemed OK so they were going to discharge him, then he died asleep in a hospital bed. Because of the anomaly (if he was well enough to discharge, why did he die?) they had to do an autopsy, and there it was; lung malignancy, COPD, hypertension. He was in his early 70s.
Do I miss him? Not the real him, I don't think. I mythologised him perhaps, aware of the dangers of doing so and yet... there was a magical aspect to him too. I wrote this poem and it became his. I post it here something like every year. Bro wept when I read it out loud and said Dad wasn't worth it. That's true too. And here's the thing; if Mum or Bro die before me, there won't be a single poetic line I can write about them, because they are too stark, too close to the root of me, too real. I get the privileged position I am in, to see all these intersections between worlds and dreams, people trying to get by and the same people as, I don't know, other at the core, but it's a stupid gift really. Doesn't actually do anything.
Anyway, Dad's Song. It's his Scottishness, his Irishness, his anger, his wandering, his imagination. I don't know if it's his homecoming.
DAD'S SONG
At Lughnasadh
I burned them all, my foes
once dancing with the dead
Went up in sparks of faded ire that rose
where once I scratched the doorways of my head
now sunward led
‘Where is the one beloved, the poet’s gold
Where are the songs of all my ancestors
Severed from me, and lost in sea and mire?'
They answered, ‘We are on the hills unknown
And in the bone
left from the funeral pyre
The winds we shake and you
And you we wake
hare-fleet and falcon-eyed beyond the tower
Behold, old Lughnasadh! Your people’s fire!'
None by the white maned sea could track me then
A wanderer by watchtowers unseen
Nor could the sages of the woven lands
unpick the fairy roads by lantern’s gleam
Their tapestries undone by end of day
The changeling way, as in a fever dream.
Marsh bitterns picked my steps through coldling fens
and called me by their piping;
flickering worm
And frostbit moon forlorn
showed me old Grendel
Riding through the dawn
Riddled me silver, never to forget
a stranger’s promise:
‘Home for Lughnasadh
Where your own people light the fires yet!’
I've put this on substack, I don't know why. Playing with it I guessm not sure I'm doing it right but I've really got to get on with dire paperwork. If you want to visit the substack and tell me if it's workingTM here's the link.
https://open.substack.com/pub/smokingboot/p/home-before-lughnasadh?r=1r9jj7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
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no subject
Date: 2025-10-02 11:45 am (UTC)And I can see the poem in the link above.
But I can't see it when I try to access it from here: https://smokingboot.substack.com/ (You should see a kind of archive with yr past pieces in it.) So, I think some additional tweakage may be called for.
It is a wonderful poem. You have such a gift for that mythic voice!
no subject
Date: 2025-10-04 09:04 am (UTC)Thank you for your lovely words about the poem. I hope Dad would have liked it.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-02 03:34 pm (UTC)HUGS for your father and for you.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-04 09:03 am (UTC)