I am spellbound by half-light,
This night-craft of unveiling stars
In the murmurous dark, between
The darkening liminal skies alive
With ghost-lights, faeries or fireflies
Etherealized by birchen pyres
Of Bealltuinn fires

The spell-craft of the unseen,
A faery’s dream, an othering
Of rebirth born of night-fires
And spirit-speak, whisperings
Of life led by the May Queen
And her well-leafed consort
Jack-o’-the-Green

And yet I see Faerie-visions,
The unseen realm, memories of ghosts,
Unforgotten echoes of echoes—
I see my beloved night-wolf
Watching with otherworldly eyes
Sublimed in volcanian light
That will never, never die

I hear violin-strains speaking
To me in a d-minor key,
And within my mind’s eye
I see a moonlit Whitby
With a memory of Keats:
Autumn’s season of mists
And Samhuinn-fire ecstasies

I am spellbound by half-light,
This night-craft of unveiling stars
In the murmurous dark, between
The darkening liminal skies alive
With ghost-lights, faeries or fireflies
Etherealized by birchen pyres
Of Bealltuinn fires.

[Clay Franklin Johnson is a writer, amateur pianist, devoted animal lover, and incorrigible reader of Gothic literature and Romantic poetry.  Clay is the author of A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems (2021), an illustrated collection of poetry published by Gothic Keats Press.  His collection’s eponymous poem, “A Ride Through Faerie”, was presented at “Ill met by moonlight”: Gothic encounters with enchantment and the Faerie realms in literature and culture, a conference organized by the Open Graves, Open Minds Project (OGOM) with the University of Hertfordshire.  The presentation was later written as an essay which was published in the Gothic Faerie issue of Gramarye (2022), the journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction from the University of Chichester.  Clay is the editor of ‘I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar’: Essays in Honour of Percy Bysshe Shelley on the Bicentenary of His Death (2022), and co-editor of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Beyond: The 125^th Anniversary of the Vampire Myth (2022).  Find out more on his website at www.clayfjohnson.com or follow him on Twitter and Instagram @ClayFJohnson.]