Crucible of Seasons

The compass rose of processes
Draws me to its centre…
Where is my way to the gold?
The dragonish earth is my transformer.
No immutable dogma,
Just what I see,feel and believe,
My body,my journey.
My every look and movement is increase.
With a sweep of the caduceus,
I crown myself the mind’s pontifex!
Symbols leap like dolphins
Over the waves,
Heralds of the sun.
Quicksilver,neither solid nor liquid,
Splits into tiny fragments
Then reforms with ease.

Midsummer’s salamander,
I clock the calcinating sun
As a black harvest gathers.
Fire,burn a new way forward
Through this forest grown around!
Solstice opens its door before me,
Half-shadow,half-light.
Courage for the year’s second birth!
I must follow the oak’s roots down.

Lammas is the tide of dissolution,
The full moon pouring into my hands,
Grains of light,rainbow globes.
The ashes are fed into the vessel
And drowned.These emotions,
Feel their power truly,then let them go.
We are water:clouds,mountains,stars.
All that waxed must now gladly wane,
As the chalice is filled from the well.

Autumn,patron saint of separation!
Seek out the poisonous lead
That weighs you down,and purge it;
In the equinox’s vesica piscis
The scales are balanced with a song..
The world is crossing my throat’s bridge,
Vibrations,angels of the ether,
I sing and tone,tuned to the trees’
And hills’ bells,conspiring in dark love.

Solar eclipse: black November is broken
Down into foul compost in the flask.
Rain,mud,gales,sleet and snow-
Sacraments of the grounded heart,
Burying the seeds it wants to grow.
Borderland falls away like wingbeats;
Slowly,humbly,the earth shoulders death,
Knuckles down to dreams’ bone-craft,
As forbears take you by the hand.

Midwinter ferments the year’s yeast:
The putrefied lead coalesces again,
Cleansed,hinting at the gold within.
The sun is returning out of the dark,
Courage to choose,to grow,to work,
The old abundance,stirring,rising
In fire-snakes and fire-wheels.
Miraculous as the fifth element,
The peacock’s tail opens its eyes.

January,February,patient distillation:
Boiling and condensing,the solution
Surges up and runs back down the glass,
Connecting,refining,transforming.
The dark moon blesses planting,
As the haloed earth waxes to the full,
Majestic as a swan on the water.
Snowdrops push up through the frost;
I carve a puissant willow wand.

The sun leaps like a hare above
-Spring! Light runs the wood paths
Jumps,laughing, from rock to rock;
Surrender to the sky!King and Queen
Are joined today,and sire an heir.
Swim,weightless,over the land,
Changing from solid to vapour
And back again;love is here,
Stepping stones across the stream.

Beltane fires!-the gold to multiply
And perfect.Joy is within,always,
Binding all it touches in a single
Expansion;the golden elixir flows
From its cave,dew of the dawn,
Overbrimming the chalice.
Disappear among the May trees,
Walk the labyrinths,spiderwebs
Of light;you are the many and the one.