Lugh's Day Gone By

“Under the summer sun,
thirty birds feeding
on figs.

Young tree branches
sagging so low -
ripe peaches.

Still in the shade,
on wet soil,
a black dragonfly. 
 
An old mind
surprised by seeing
a purple fairy at sunset,
dancing to the crickets’ tunes,
leaping as guinea hens screech,
wary of the bats,
hovering to say,
“Lugh’s Day, Lugh’s Day.”

Crackling fires
glowing
under the full moon.

Peace in the Valley.”
- Mike Garofalo, Lugh’s Fairy   

Lammas, Lughnasadth, Mid-Summer Festival: A NeoPagan Summer Celebration

Above the Fog: Short Poems by Mike Garofalo 

Cuttings:  Haiku by Mike Garofalo



"All paganism is at bottom a worship of nature in some form or other, and in all pagan religions the deepest and most awe-inspiring attribute of nature was its power of re-production. The mystery of birth and becoming was the deepest mystery of nature; it lay at the root of all thoughtful paganism, and appeared in various forms, some of a more innocent, others of a most debasing type. To ancient pagan thinkers, as well as to modern men of science, the key to the hidden secret of the origin and preservation of the universe lay in the mystery of sex. Two energies or agents, one an active and generative, other a feminine, passive, or susceptible one, were everywhere thought to combine for creative purposes; and heaven and earth sun and moon, day and night, were believed to co-operate to the production of being. Upon some such basis as this rested almost all the polytheistic worship of the old civilization; and to it may be traced back, by stage, the separation of divinity into male and female gods; the deification of distinct powers of nature, and the idealization of man's own faculties, desires, and lusts; where every power of his understanding was embodied as an object of adoration, and every impulse of his will became an incarnation of deity."
-   A.T. Jones, Ancient Sun Worship and Its Impact on Christianity