Snowdrops in Late Winter
The Crone’s Song
~ Doris Henderson
She gave to me a witching ring,
a wraith of clouds, a song to sing,
a whispered voice in the leafing tree,
the melting waters of an ice cold sea.
The winter is gone, the hills are bare.
The rabbit wakes from her darkened lair.
My heart is hungry and my soul is free –
O Goddess, give a sign to me.
A bird in flight, so black of wing,
across my path in the early spring.
She casts her eye, she holds me fast;
I see her shadow in the tangled grass.
O Hecate pale, your call I know;
my hand grows cold like the nettle’s sting:
the blackbird turns, and lets me go.
She gives to me another spring.
The chilly wind a-rushing free,
the pale green veils of the willow tree,
the circling hills, the melting snows,
the sheltered rock where the crocus grows.
The Beltane fires will burn once more,
like fifty summers I’ve known before.
The icy blue sky, the falling rain . . .
She gives me back my life again.
Poem found in Casting the Circle: A Women’s Book of Ritual by Diane Stein
Picture found here.
“Loveliest of Trees” by A.E. Housman
LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.