LIGHT
Persephone Presses Upwards.
The Sun is falling back in love with the day, spending longer and longer with her, peeling himself away later and later, arriving to wake her earlier and earlier.
The clocks moved forward.
Persephone is pressing towards the upper world.
For a moment at this time of year, I feel a secret sadness at the trees leafing up because the green cover will hide the birds from me. The last traces of the Winter - which I seem to crave all year, in some way - are forced out, extruded from the tips of branches by new buds, wiped from the sky by the Sun’s cleansing.
Persephone will leave Hades for six whole months.
My sadness at Winter’s death fades as I see Hares, first loping then racing through the Barley fields. Magnolia flowers swell and slowly unfurl, regal napkin-thick petals dipped in pink icing sugar.
Around these parts, Roe Deer stutter into the road looking dazed as they seek their kin. Buzzards screek at each other in the taller trees. In the grass, Primroses have been beaming for a good month now, Violets shimmer a jewel-purple dance as the less than settled weather ruffles through their shaded banks.
Somewhere flower crowns are being fashioned. A grandmother is showing her granddaughters how to twine the stalks of the plants together and how to space them so that there are leaves and flowers in clustering lines through the whole garland. Folk songs are hummed and passed along the line as the children and their mother hang delicate tree branches with gilded eggs. Light passes through the window in a pleasing beam onto the wooden floor, it catches the shine of the eggs as they gently rock to the vibrations of the people big and small, moving about this little house. An aromatic fruit cake is being covered in marzipan, later to be glazed in syrupy apricot.
Here a little town square is being made ready for the imminent wave of Spring celebrations. Each household is shaking out rugs and flinging open windows, a ritualistic sweeping out of old woman winter’s ashes: she is given back to the wind.
In gardens and churchyard small holdings, chickens busily peck at the beetling beasts between the clover and daisies. Geese wander the lane and shrill at passers by, the glassy embering eyes of hare peep out between Grass Barley blades. There is a gathering of folk at the far end of the village, with their tall mask-headed props and capes. They will rehearse how to wear these monsters and walk in them, until the bell begins to call them to the top of the hill.
