All Hallow’s Eve

Intergalactic wayfarer, greetings to you and yours!

After journeys long and worries sore,

Give beams, nodes and maps a rest

In this our corner of the world, lest

You are lost let me be your guide…

Gather close as I let

You in on a little fête

Some call Halloween,

Samhain or All Hallows Eve:

As now the Earth tilts,

a chill rides the air and lilts

upon deciduous leaves losing their green,

on Carnival tents that line the seams

of towns in spades,

on candy apples sugaring the mouths of babes,

on pumpkins carried from farms

under overalled arms

while Spider weaves names

and Crow laughs along with the games.

That is the autumnal setting

So here is the lore—betting

years grow yet more of it to tell

than ghouls, goblins and witches’ spells:

As late bright days slide to early dark,

the season mirrors life’s brief ark—

A hard-toiled harvest

ending in wintry burial rest.

With so many lives who’ve come before,

Do not fear, gentle traveler, but be warned

that All Hallows Eve is the Deads’ Day

To uprise from hillock and brae

To rejoin the fray of those corporeal, blood-blighted and warm. Spirits roil

and commune while we don clever guise

and build bonfires high

to stay them off our course.

Galavanting in the streets

We demand sweets, singing “trick or treat,”

Decked as characters old and new—

Some who may even look like you.

Seeking fright we tell stories, play undulating tunes to dance and sway.

To some it may be riddled with camp and gore,

But know that its roots are at the door

of all that is mystic and ethereal,

The thin veil between fabled and material,

Boundaries transferred and transgressed

much like your intergalactic quest.

So please take no offense

To bereaved revelry or delirious hubris,

Nor begrudge us our little peccadilloes and superstitions,

From your inter and other-worldly position

of science and conquest,

but after All Hallows Eve is done, pray give this weary ghost a rest.