The Halloween Party by Aidan Mathews

The Halloween Party

by Aidan Mathews

(published in The Irish Times, October 29, 2022)

I hoist a knitted skeleton on a drip-stand in the porch.

The children are coming, a hundred and twenty last year.

Remember the white-face zombie in her communion dress

And the imp with the actual scythe and his separated father

Standing shyly out at the gate as if it were Saturday.

Later, the lights gone out in the scared terraces,

There will be no safe house for the lads in the black bin-liners.

I place a candle on the ledge of the lunette to illumine

A later myth than the carnival of Samhain -

This is no shambles, it tells me, this is Shangri La;

The Fall, the Flood, those are our fathers’ phantoms.

But a bumble-bee with long yellow stockings of pollen

Gorges on a folding passion-flower and cannot help herself

On the eve of November as the month of the dead begins.

This wonderful poem makes all kinds of connections between life and death (mostly--there are others)--two opposites--that make poems so much fun to read. The first is "the white-face zombie in her communion dress" and the poem ends with the very visual image of a bee on a flower, plus a reminder that death, as in winter, as in All Saints and All Souls Day, as in cold weather, as in that bee and that flower are not long for this world.

The poet references Samhain, a pagan tradition; Shangri-La, a literary and fictional earthly paradise; and religion, in this case, Christianity: "The Fall, the Flood." We do exist daily with all of these influences, of course, even if we do not realize the source of our traditions. Halloween may be the best-known cultural event that mixes the old and new, the ways of the ancients with things religion incorporated from them, as well as pieces from culture (high, low, and pop).

It seemed fitting to post an Irish poem for Halloween. To find out why I think that, enjoy this gift link to a New York Times article on the origins of Halloween.

Boo!