It would be impossible

this May Eve, at this time of pandemic, not to speak of the second plague in the tale of Lludd and Llefelys. Of the dragon’s scream heard this night which ‘pierced people’s hearts and terrified them so much that men lost their colour and their strength, and women miscarried, and young men and maidens lost their senses, and all animals and trees and the earth and the waters were left barren.’

It would be impossible not to recall how Lludd dug a hole in the centre of the Island of Britain, filled it with mead, laid a sheet of brocaded silk on top. How he called down our screaming red dragon, battling with the white dragon, spiralling, spiralling, spiralling down, through the forms of bulls, wolves, boars, into two little pigs who drank the mead and fell asleep before he wrapped them up in the brocaded silk like two little babies and buried them in a stone chest at Dinas Emrys.

It would be impossible not to think of how the image of the serpentine bodies of the dragons intertwining looks like two strands of DNA and one alone like a single strand of RNA and to be reminded of the structure of a virus with its strand or strands carried within the stone chest of its capsid. Of how, like the dragons, viruses shift through a countless series of mutations before they sleep.

It would be impossible not to call to Lludd, to pray to that he, with his serpent-staff propped in the corner of his laboratory as he bends over a microscope, silver as his silver hand, will help us find a vaccine.

It would be impossible not to ask him to bring an end to our being locked up, like Creiddylad in her father’s house, which for some is a dream and for others a nightmare they fear is never going to end.

It would be impossible not to wonder who unlocked the stony chest and set the dragons free. To desire to find some perpetrator, some key, some rational explanation, some meaning to these events. Vengeance by the angry hordes of monstrous animals locked in stone chests or by the gods. The laws of evolution. Science. A balancing act of the Earth as a result of human excess. But it would be impossible.

*The image is from 14. Balance in the Wildwood Tarot.

Prayer for Patience

‘Long is the day and long is the night,
and long is the waiting of Arawn’
Cardigan folktale

I do not know
if you are Arawn but

long is your waiting.

Long as the day
and long as the night:
both so long this
equinox

with its
painful dichotomy
of pandemic and sunlight.

I know you are there
waiting patiently.

I pray
my patience
will be long as yours
sitting quietly on a grey horse
on the brink of Annwn
life and death

watching
the flowers grow
your beloved
departing.

I pray
for the patience
of a flower

that we shall grow
and flourish
another
year

touched by
the dew of your tears
on a cold March morning.