Mistletoe clusters
On tall bare wintry poplars,
Pale, poisoned berries
*
Sowing witches’ brooms
With Saturnalian seed
To spread love’s shrouding
*
Solstice potency:
Nurturing nest, fast food for birds,
Spring’s bees, butterflies
*
But all’s veiled, still, now—
This short midwinter moment
Death’s reared in beauty
*
Breeds life in sticky
Clinging, skeletal branches,
Mistletoe clusters.
*
**
*
“Saturnalian seed” is good.
It contains the mixed aspects of procreation and festivity and love and liberation with the more ominous and disquieting aspects of death, dissolution, disorder. Saturn was freed from his Temple only during the Saturnalia.
More to the point, it’s about mistletoe—the sacred Saturnalian plant of orgiastic solstice revels to which all—master, servant, slave, all come together!