The Burning Dawn

Ever have we sought to escape the burning dawn, yet we cannot; for it comes like lightning from the East, enveloping us in its eternal presence. We run to the darkness, create shadow-play, puppets, Punch and Judy, cinema. We no longer dance and revel in moonlit fields set aside for hilarity and fire. We now enter the darkened room and have a seat to watch, like bad alley children peering in on the unsuspecting family, the scene set before us by the powerful magicians of our age. We worship them; idolize their marionettes; yet they lie in wait for us behind the masks of their sinister visions. We dance at dusk like angels forgotten by life, fallen and needing to create, that we might seem valid in a universe we have made invalid. Our most recent ancestors still understood the value of the communal revel; the daunse of the May pole; the bonfires of Samhain; the sacred quiet of Imbolc. But these we allowed to be taken from us; first by pompous men in red suits; and then by a new model army slaughtering in the name of the stoic god of the Puritan. We haven’t fully recovered our losses. But we will run back to the high places like hinds, on the strange dawn coming.

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Skadi meic Beorh