Slipping through the crowds, dancing through needle-sharp raindrops, fighting for footing on icy pavements – oh, how we fight the cold grip of Winter! The city becomes a living beacon, a hive lit by a thousand-million fairy lights all reflected in garlands of tinsel, bouncing off the burnished surface of baubles. From a distance, it is magical, a fairyland fairground, the merry-go-round of shops and drinks and food, complete with endless tinkling music from each competing attraction. It calls and it beckons, and it winks seductively while advertisements howl above the wind, and there are characters you couldn’t be sure aren’t Púca in disguise, and sometimes you go where you shouldn’t, because after all, you’re only young once or you once were young.

For those who call it home, the very act of rising in the morning is an act of defiance. Leave your warm bed and face the wintry sun at best, or the full fury of storm and wind and rain if the luck is against you, and the way we run from door to car, and car to door with jacket and hat and scarf, trying to carry some sense of snugness with us into the unforgiving day. Pass those at bus stops, envy in their eyes, as they eye the cars in obedient rows inch through the traffic, radios on and wipers beating a syncopated rhythm. There is no cold like that of a queue, wondering how many the bus driver will allow on, wondering where the promised 8.35 is, and whether you will have time to grab a coffee or will you have to sit in an overheated but somehow still draughty office in damp clothes with too much sleep still coursing through your veins?

And it’s a far cry from this you were reared, in the days of the Ancestors with their harsh lives and the fear that every sunrise might be your last, and the hard ground too tough to break to dig a grave – which is why we won’t go back, won’t romanticise the Good Old Days, when we met at Samhain to say goodbye, in all solemnity.

Look instead at the threads that bind us and the joys we share. A thousand years ago, it was just as hard to rise, and the hands that sought comfort in a hot drink, in a sup of something flowing through you laced with fire, are no different from the hands that a thousand years before them left the comfort of the bed, and reached for the same. Three thousand, four thousand years piled on years and centuries heaped high, it was hard to rise and easy to fall, and the things that comforted us remain comfortingly the same.

A warm thing to cover you – does it matter if it is designer or homemade, woven or tanned, in bright colours or plain? If the touch of it warms you and you can spread it over those you love, it is the bear pelt of your Ancestor made real. Coffee from the far flung lands or bitters in water heated over a fire, if it takes the chill from bones and opens eyes wider, you are walking in footsteps left across time. I make scrambled eggs and toast, sausages with bread and butter, feeding hungry mouths, and I am the mother making stirabout in the tumble down, with the mud walls, paying rent to live on my own stolen land.

Some will go to Newgrange to see the great sunrise enter the chamber at the heart of the tomb, and I would love to stand there, no word of a lie but I will draw back curtains in my children’s bedroom and let in light, light as sacred as any blessed by the narrow passageway of Brú na Bóinne because it is the rituals of daily life that get us through the dark nights. It is the cry of the street sellers, Two for a Euro, The Wrapping Paper and maybe it was once Five for a Pound, The Wrapping Paper, but is it not the same melody? Mince pies, and mulled wine and cheese and smoked salmon on brown bread instead of the weakest cattle slaughtered for some meat to keep us going until spring, but are they not still feasts? Is this not still rejoicing because we have made it to the midway point, and the sun will return, and the seeds are alive under the unturned soil? 

And young people still dance, in high heels and jeans and under coloured lights, but they twirl and whirl and skip like they once did, barefoot by the bonfire, and that long ago. And they still traipse home tired and happy, and probably tell the same lies their grandparents told, which are the same half-truths and excuses their great, great, grandparents gave to stern-eyed parents eyeing the breaking dawn.

So lean into the little things. The hot sup of tea, the cards you hate writing, and the gifts to be wrapped. Celebrate the bright moon amid stars on a frosty night, the howl of wind through the chimney ruffling the flames of a freshly lit fire. Face the troubles of each day, because you have lived to see that dawn, and that’s something at least. Meet the old friend, who only appears once a year. Drink in the old pub, with the old faces, and laugh at the stories told a thousand times. Let in the light each morning, and draw the drapes against the darkness every night.

Each of these is a prayer, is a benediction, is a whispered promise of Spring, whose name we hardly dare say yet.

Geraldine Moorkens Byrne is a well-known poet and writer, as well as an educator in Irish Folk Magic Traditions and Ceremony writer; she was a founding editor of the Pagan Poetry Pages. She has facilitated workshops and creative writing groups. Her work has been published in a variety of media, from print anthologies to Ezines, including Poems from a Lockdown, and her poem “Where Once Were Warriors “was the title piece of Asia Geographic Tribes edition. Several poems have been performed as theatre in Ireland, the UK and the USA. She was a prize winner in the Inaugural John Creedon Listowel Writers Festival Competition. Her short story “A Stranger Among Friends,” was a winner in the Cunningham Short Story Competition. She is also the author of a popular series of mystery novels. Her collection of poetry “Dreams of Reality” is available now.

She was the fourth generation of Byrnes to run the famous Charles Byrne Music Shop, in Stephen Street Dublin Ireland. This was a landmark business in the city of Dublin and an integral part of Irish classical and traditional music for 150 years.

For more details: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/moon-books/authors/geraldine-moorkens-byrne