Festivals

Dawn horsemen of the Common Ridings hacking round the Scottish Border fields, soldiers of tradition, drunk on rum and milk, bearing their standards high;

Madmen running with the bulls at Pamplona, in the storming terror and bedlam, chancing the horns of fate, on a flood of beer, sangria and blood;

Music galloping over the Glastonbury fields, all stars and dawns and dancing moons, while summer rains golden showers on the heads of the young;

Hogmanay crowds in Edinburgh, wild and whiskied, plunging off the cliff of midnight into the suns’ abyss, while the world goes up in fireworks;

The crazed High Mass of La Tomatina, in the brimming streets of Buñol, the red warriors bombarding each other with the sacred grenades to ecstasy and exhaustion;

The wild giants of las Fallas lurching through the fiery roar and smoke of winter’s end, spewing scathing verses, as hell releases its demons in furies of joy;

The flaming beacons, marching torches and leaping flares of Lewes Bonfire Night, as the year rolls like a burning tar barrel through the dark, and the Devil-Pope explodes in hellfire;

Oktoberfest revellers, swimming to oblivion’s Barbary shores across foaming ambrosial oceans of beer, for life is just too blonde and beautiful to bear;

Aztec ecstasies on the Day of the Dead, all the living skeletons feasting on the bread of souls, raising pyramids of sugar skulls to the sun;

Mardi Gras in New Orleans, casting miracles and signs to the mad, as beads to Indians, black messiahs damned to dance through the hurricane;

Shining brown bodies of Trinidad, carousing on waves of rum and sunfire, wallowing in the mud of sex and sound, rising to the heights of Africa;

Smoke of jasmine, incense and incense in the Kandy streets at Esala Perahera, gold silk elephants processing through the drum-storm, the Buddha’s tooth borne high in its casket;

Delirious dancers frenzying under the full moon on Hat Rin beach in Thailand, dissolving into the waves in a mushroom-cloud of love and wonder;

Holi lunatics, high on bhang, running riot across India, painting the world with vivid colours, the full moon’s bonfire showering them with white fire, with soma;

The naked star-blessed hordes of Kumbh Mela, amid the circus of gods, stampeding into the Ganges’ nectar, to cleanse their carnival lifetimes of sin;

Mongol warriors galloping and wrestling on the Naadam fields, swilling the sky’s kumiss, and singing their arrows to the target,the sun’s white banner theirs to win.