Livestream at Winter Solstice
Newgrange Passage Tomb, Boyne Valley
An unfortunate year the spectacle is denied,
but still we blearily view the livestream,
dawn voyeurs peering into laptops, phones,
hushed to not disturb the ritual of light.
Hoping for an afterglare betraying the past,
a burgeoning crack in the ancestral door. We listen,
blue-lit, yawning, for whatever’s carried
in the blood’s undertow to be awoken.
Locking in fear, ice grips the etched pathways,
the dung-spattered kerbstones of the hillside
rinsed of familiar names forgotten and forgotten.
A farmyard play-set from the camera drone,
New Hollands dropped by a careless infant.
Ear-tagged heifers slope toward the burial mound,
its quartz-dashed surround deemed photogenic.
Screens glitch, pause, catch up to the dreary stream.
Live again, we follow the camera along its tracks
gliding through prisms where no humans fit.
Imploding mist ensures no light
feathers spiral engravings, spears intricate channels,
fills the lexicon of grief gouged into stone.
Without solstice beam stretching like a fleshless finger,
passages of the dead remain resolute, beyond thaw.
Thin shadows gather to mourn.
In speeded camerawork, distracting from the no-show,
theatrical fog may be hoarded breath. The deepest silence
felt in the instant beyond death is fifty centuries gone.
Dreamt through the main chamber, designed to trap the sun,
early god is viewed through an end-of-pier telescope,
rarely operative. Built to distil the threadbare hours
with an ancestor’s speculative eye for the stars.
Beyond the sullen iron back of the Irish Sea,
my immediate dead rest in rows of marble and quartz,
brim inside urns bordering communal gardens.
Dangling from willow trees, wind chimes
carry across the water. Bottles of birthday Guinness
seep into soil. Ceilings of anonymous lawn
trapped by the same ritual-spoiling mist.
No light trickles in.
Night loans the shortest day grudgingly, on condition
the dark be returned unsullied, intact.
Within the sightless ancient the livestream ends.
Off-camera tombs exhale, crows retreat,
choirs of craft shop candles are snuffed out.
The crew violently zip-up tripods, blind lenses.
Another drone’s written off to the heavens.
Cursing politely at the one that got away,
presenters’ microphones are disconnected
sending amplified scuffles, fabric protest,
furious feedback to the drowsing creatures.
Draped in protective shrouds by the runners,
the talent is preserved for another time
when the gods might be on their side.
The producer frets about viewing figures,
considers new faces for next solstice.
A discarded apple core half-trodden into the earth,
coffee grounds scattered across Neolithic threshold–
meagre offerings from the sunless pagans
convoying back to the guesthouse for breakfast,
unsure of how to honour mothers and fathers,
how best to blanket them in light.
Published in Abridged