Beltane Signs

Beltane is traditionally 1st of May, but my poem is always the nearest Saturday to such events. By a happy coincidence it occurs on the same day as Guernsey's Beltane festival (https://arts.gg/events/la-beltane-2025/) so I have used their poster display above. Ronald Hutton had this to say in "Stations of the Sun" (https://academic.oup.com/book/1390/chapter-abstract/140713783) on "the major Celtic feast that opened the warmer half of the year"

"It is best known today by a variant of the Gaelic name for its main custom: out of about a dozen different spellings, the very influential scholar Sir James Frazer selected one Scottish example which, being itself an Anglicized version, was best for English readers. In popular literature in the English language it has thus, ever since, been ‘Beltane’. The earliest reference to it is probably in Sanas Chormaic, an early medieval glossary of Ireland attributed to the Munster churchman Cormac of Cashel."

While reflecting Beltane as a fire festival, this poem also attempts to say something new about the imagined deep history of the festival.

Beltane Signs

A fireball streaks across a darkening sky
Burning yellow, a descending flame
A bringer of joy, a delight to the eye
Like this, an omen of Beltane came

Candles lit, yellow flaming bright
Flickering in a breeze that blows
Granite walls shout their delight
In a dolmen, Beltane glory grows

Bonfires burn high upon the hill
Ash and flame are leaping high
The tribe united with one will
Beltane comes, a joyful cry

Rejoice with Beltane signs today
And let the fires show our way