May Day: life, magic, work

May Day weekend. In the modern Britain, it’s just ‘Early May Bank Holiday’, but the date marks the ancient festival of spring, long pre-dating Easter as a celebration of renewal, the mysteries of birth and life and fertility.

When I was little we danced around a Maypole at school. We practiced for about a week, skipping in opposite directions to our neighbours to weave our ribbons around the pole, and I loved it. At home we made woven May baskets out of coloured paper, picked flowers and filled the baskets with them, and gave them away to neighbours. When I think of the symbolism of this day — Beltane, as we now know to call it, not just ‘May Day’ — I think of how I loved the two chapter titles in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: ‘Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time’, and ‘Deeper Magic from Before the Dawn of Time’. They relate the rebirth of Aslan from the terrible binds the White Witch’s henchmen have put him in — so it’s Easter, to CS Lewis, but if it’s from before the dawn of time, it’s May Day.

The deep magic of this day —exactly six months from the Halloween, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day, the Day of the Dead, Día de los Muertos — is the other side of that same coin. The coin on the eyes of the dead. It’s the deep magic of birth, life, the fleeting fecundity and abundance and power of life. These are two poles of the year: the magic goes through like writing in a stick of rock.

Edinburgh Fire Festival, 2019

The other meaning of the 1st of May, of course, is that it’s International Workers’ Day. The vast majority of the world celebrates this day of the worker, which was declared in 1890 after a decades-long international campaign for the eight-hour working day. 1st May was chosen in honour of the Haymarket Affair, in Chicago in 1886, when a workers’ rights protest blew up (literally, because someone planted a bomb). People have fought and starved and died for the right to work safely, be paid enough to live on, and have time off.

We need to remember all this now, when workers’ rights are being eroded here in the UK and also in the US, and the global corporations bamboozle us to turn a blind eye elsewhere. I’m not going to turn this into a big political post, but it’s worth remembering that all magic has to be constant: rights are never given, only won. Spells don’t last forever. Even spring has to come back again, over and over, every year.

Magic is always performed by workers; in the stories it’s done by long-suffering genies and wizards, loving fairy godmothers, good or wicked witches, the little people, and dragons. On Beltane, it’s the Green Man, the May Queen, Flora, the Oak King… In the world of work, which is to say in the globalist hive of industry, spinning straw into gold for the billionaires, it’s us. We’re the little people.

When Keats wrote, ‘If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all’, he didn’t mean it’s supposed to be easy or thoughtless, or that you don’t have to spend hours on it. Two sentences earlier in the same letter, he’s talking about the precise placement of commas in a line. It comes naturally because leaves are what a tree does. But putting out those leaves — a form of magic if there ever was one — takes a lot of energy and time. And that’s poetry.

Lorine Niedecker, the great, modest, modernist poet, wrote a famous and very short poem combining this particular magic with the fact that we ‘unacknowledged legislators’ (to quote Shelley) are also workers: Poet’s Work (click the link to read) is never dar from my mind.

Of course there’s no layoff. The work comes from within, just as the fires of Beltane come from within the Earth, like the flowers. Like the leaves from the tree.

The Shakers had a saying: Every force evolves a form. Maybe that’s another whole post, actually. In any case, this magic of the hands, of work, of action, of making things, and making things happen, new things, is an excellent subject for poetry. It’s all the same thing on May Day.

Here is the American poet BH Fairchild’s poem, ‘Keats’. And yes, it’s about Keats.

Keats

I knew him. He ran the lathe next to mine.
Perfectionist, a madman, even on overtime
Saturday night. Hum of the crowd floating
from the ball park, shouts, slamming doors
from the bar down the street, he would lean
into the lathe and make a little song
with the honing cloth, rubbing the edges,
smiling like a man asleep, dreaming.
A short guy, but fearless. At Margie’s
he would take no lip, put the mechanic big
as a Buick through a stack of crates out back
and walked away with a broken thumb
but never said a word. Marge was a loud,
dirty girl with boozy breath and bad manners.
He loved her. One night late I saw them in
the kitchen dancing something like a rumba
to the radio, dishtowels wrapped around
their heads like swamis. Their laughter chimed
rich as brass rivets rolling down a tin roof.
But it was the work that kept him out of fights,
and I remember the red hair flaming
beneath the lamp, calipers measuring out
the last cut, his hands flicking iron burrs
like shooting stars through the shadows.
It was the iron, cut to a perfect fit, smooth
as bone china and gleaming under lamplight
that made him stand back, take out a smoke,
and sing. It was the dust that got him, his lungs
collapsed from breathing in a life of work.
Lying there, his hands are what I can’t forget.

BH Fairchild
from The Art of the Lathe

The next term of my Saturday morning poetry workshop group begins next week: Saturday, 7th May.
Drop me a line to join.