Samhain and All Shall Be Well

By Helen Jones

Samhain

This is the night the dead come home.
The veil between the worlds is torn,
Old, tattered flag,
Flaps in the wind.
They brush the rags aside,
Curling like smoke through time
To sit and eat with those they left behind.

I peer into the shadows,
Sit and wait,
Each nerve stretched into darkness,
Muscles tense, vibrate in air.
Yet still you do not come, and nothing fills
The void of uncertainty within my heart.
My thoughts are suffocated,
Movement ceased.

I did not know
That I could lose you, finally, complete.
Believed that we were linked so close
That I would know just what and where you were
But the chain is broken
And my table bare.

The door is slammed and bolted.
Though I batter hard,
Bloodied and bruised with longing,
I can hear no word.
No sign of what comes after,
Whether souls survive,
No certainty that we will meet again.
On Samhain there falls the silence of the years,
That I must live
And bear.

All Shall Be Well

All shall be well, she said.
Though she had seen the plague
Stuffing whole families in its hungry mouth,
Drowned in the smell of stinking buboes,
Bursting with fiery pus,
Cried as the streets choked
With the unclaimed dead,
All shall be well.

All shall be well, she said.
Outside the beggars show,
Stigmata sores and women, arms like twigs,
Beg in the street,
Swayed by the wind to breaking,
Men, their faces ravaged,
Stretch hands in supplication,
Unheard prayers,
All shall be well.

All shall be well, she said,
Though hunger fires revolt
And desperate men will run through city streets,
To face a battle,
Mown down and slashed,
Their leader’s bloated corpse,
Upon gallows that a bishop built.

All shall be well.
All shall be well, she says,
The mother-God,
Cradles her children in protective arms,
Soothes all their hurts, enwraps them in her love,
All shall be well.
The stink of city streets invades her cell.

Helen Jones gained a degree in English, many years ago from University College London and later an
M.Ed. from the University of Liverpool. She is now happily retired and spend a lot of her time writing
and making a new garden.