Midsummer Revelations

Now all of life is ours. A summer’s eve tale traced back to ancient times, held in our hands for this moment to spin like a golden orb, followed across the horizon into unknown lands, soon to wake with dewdrop treasure in the morning. A ripening of youth, a revelation of mind, a time of summer’s glory.

There’s a forest clearing where foxglove grow. Petal by flower, twig by seed, adorned to their finest with campion’s grace and sorrel’s filigree sequins this to me, is the centre of the world tonight. Under birches draped branches, the adoration of meadow-grass, foxglove almost touches the barn-owl’s satin wings. Waterfowl chants by the lakeside, deer bark from the woods and here he circles, so quietly, undisturbed, no foreign sound to alter his flight.

As the lowering sunshine slants across branches of mossy stem and porcelain leaf, tall grass, gold-spun, all wave in the breeze under wagtail’s whirring wings. Seed-heads burst like sparks of fire and doe’s dark eyes soften in genteel grace. Wings lit by silken light, returned across a velvet vale. Fields linked by rows of poles; tawny owl’s perch, as silently she waits for sunset. Tonight is celebration, of all that the valley’s fabric can dish, standing tall before the first cut, rich in soil and seed, a culmination of what’s planted, what’s sought, a centre of strength, grown from the core of the world, farther than the waning sunlight, more crystalline than the rising moon. 

In full glory, she arrives from the east, amber and diamond, taking daylight across the dusky dells in a carriage ride across the skies.