Celebrating The Seasons: October 2009

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Happy Hallowe'en!

"Hark! Hark to the wind! 'T is the night, they say,
When all the souls come back from the far away-
The dead, forgotten this many a day!

"And the dead remembered-ay! long and well-
And the little children whose spirits dwell
In God's green garden of asphodel.

"Have you reached the country of all content,
O souls we know, since the day you went
From this time-worn world, where your years were spent?

"Would you come back to the sun and the rain,
The sweetness, the strife, the thing we call pain,
And then unravel life's tangle again?

"I lean to the dark-Hush!- was it a sigh?
Or the painted vine-leaves that rustled by?
Or only a night-bird's echoing cry?"

-Sheard: Hallowe'en.

Hallowe'en

A gypsy flame is on the hearth,
Sign of this carnival of mirth.
Through the dun fields and from the glade
Flash merry folk in masquerade-
It is the witching Hallowe'en.

Pale tapers glimmer in the sky,
The dead and dying leaves go by;
Dimly across the faded green
Strange shadows, stranger shades, are seen,-
It is the mystic Hallowe'en.

Soft gusts of love and memory
Beat at the heart reproachfully;
The lights that burn for those who die
Were flickering low, let them flare high-
It is the haunting Hallowe'en.

-A.F. Murray in Harper's Weekly, Oct. 30, 1909

Happy Halloween!

THE NIGHT HE CAME HOME

Black cats and goblins

And broomsticks and ghosts

Covens of witches with all of their hosts

You may think they scare me

You're probably right

Black cats and goblins

On Halloween night

Trick or Treat.

Sheriff Leigh Brackett: It's Halloween, everyone's entitled to one good scare.

Dr. Sam Loomis:" I met him, fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes... the *devil's* eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... *evil*. "

Tommy Doyle:" You can't kill the bogeyman!"

-John Carpenter's Halloween (1978)