Yew

Grief and sacred sanctuary

A lone hawthorn in the freezing fog

November, Samhain, in Ireland. As I write (on Saturday 11th) there is a freezing fog around the house, which lingers long past noon. I cannot see past the edges of the garden, all beyond is a murky white. The shroud of winter on the land. Sometimes it doesn’t lift for days here, called up from both the river and the bog, and it sets me to dreaming, even whilst awake. The house falls out of time, and all becomes the in-between.  

In folklore a mist like this is known as the féth fíada and it is a magical veil the other crowd use to cloak their journeys in our realm. I would not be surprised, not here, and not after spending weeks crying my heart out, begging this land to help. Somehow. This beautiful, blood-soaked land whose fertile soils are full of mass graves, this land which knows, so deeply knows. I beg it to rise.

Midweek I watched the crows high against a crystal blue sky, calling out in their keening cries as they soared over the crescent moon, a pale ghost at noon in the garden where I went to weep. Where I went to earth the pain and the grief of living in the world as we’ve been shown it to be in the last month. The veils dropping to show us the truth of the world. A world where parents write their children’s names on their tiny limbs before putting them to bed each night. Tucking them in with the knowledge that for them the morning may never come. That there may be no one left to name the dead. I cannot fathom it. I watch a father refuse to leave a cemetery, sleeping atop the grave of his family because his children feared the dark. I sob as I watch another lifeless baby laid on the floor. Wrapped in white. I watch an old woman, bent, and stooped and lined as the beloved olive trees walk from her home, fleeing at the gentle pace of the elderly from a destruction which has come for her time and again in her long life, her family staying slow by her side. I watch a young woman, of great journalistic integrity so lacking in our western media, beg for the lives of her friend and his family, under siege. I sob as I read of doctors manually sustaining the lives of premature babies, relentlessly for hours because the incubators cannot function without the fuel they have been deprived of. Hours of manually pumping air into a tiny baby’s lungs whilst beset by sniper fire. I watch mothers carrying their children in a forced exodus. I watch men dig in the rubble with their bare hands to search for their loved ones and strangers alike. I watch them weep. On and on it goes, fresh horror every hour, live in the palms of our hands. Somehow it continues. Somehow no one in power has stopped it. And still, I do not look away. The grandmothers at my back, my blood, my humanity means I cannot. I will not.

My responsibility as a poet, as an artist, is to not look away. – Nikky Finney

Some nights I think I cannot hold this grief; I cannot bear it. I lie by the fire and cry. I cannot sleep with it. My dreams take me to the terrifying heart of it. I need held through the night, until dawn. And I am over two thousand miles away, wholly safe in my bed. I cannot comprehend the depths of the fear, grief, and pain of those living this nightmare.

And so, I give my grief to the earth; I call my grandmothers to my back. I speak to friends, wonderful, beautiful women who are in the same grief, who are struggling to hold it. And I see the circle of it, of community, of love; and this is how we hold it. Circles upon circles, ever widening out from the centre. Staying soft, staying in love. Love that is not silence in the face of a genocide. Love that screams for it to stop. Love that rages against any system that harms another being. Love. Circles of it. Wider ever wider until it is the earth herself standing at our back. For she is the centre and the rim. She holds the dead; she holds the seeds.

Monday brings the New Moon, the dark of the moon, the seed of a new cycle. And so, it is time for me to write of folklore and of plants. Yet I cannot write as normal, I cannot draw from the well of my creativity and draw up anything other than the grief of this moment.

And so today I will bring you folklore, Irish and sacred, but it is of the yew, of grief and of sanctuary.

In order for me to write poetry that’s not political, I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds the warplanes must be silent. – Marwan Makhoul

I know you don’t come here for politics. I understand that somehow the doublethink of our culture holds condemning a genocide to be a political act. And yet every post I have written here so far has been deeply political. Each time I use a gaeilge word it is a decolonialising act. It is a reclamation of a language stripped from our tongues under the brutality of oppression and then further still under the insidious brutality of capitalism which made it more beneficial to speak the oppressor’s language than our own. To learn it now, generations after it was gone from my ancestors’ mouths, to use its words, is political.

Each time I recount for you Irish folklore it is a decolonialising act. Sifting through the layers of settler influence and stripping off the imperialist Christian veneer to find its core is a political act. To speak of Ireland as I do, as a whole land instead of a segregated one is a political act. To speak of the sacredness of native Irish trees, which were protected under ancient law before they were felled by the colonisers, is a political act. Once all of Ireland was forest, but they provided too much shelter, food, and camouflage for the defending indigenous Irish, so it was a priority of the invading regime to clear them. Each time I root down into this land, a land which knows genocide, a land scarred by clearances, to pull down stories for you here it is a political act. And now my love for humanity, my desire for life, for freedom for all, is seemingly a political act. So be it.

I deliberately did not name a character in my barley piece as the rebel he is, because I deemed it too political. But the only way we can avoid repeating the atrocities of history is by speaking of them. I come from a long line of women who hurled the little streets upon the great^[1], it is time I used my whole voice, my sight, and my blood to follow in their footsteps. Use your voice, they said in a dream, and so I can no longer hold my tongue, or my pen. All of storytelling is a political act, it has the power to move culture or stagnate it, it has the power to cut through the noise and find the humanity at the centre. It is the job of the artist to reflect and uncover, to provoke the audience to ask questions of themselves and others, and no artist works in a vacuum. To stay silent is a political choice, to stagnate stories with the oppressors veneer is a political choice and to peel it back and situate it in the questions of our time is a political choice. My content won’t change, I will still bring you the beautiful folklore of this land, I will still write fiction steeped in it, but I cannot stay silent as the world burns around us.

I have removed the paywall from Some Mother’s Son, it is lengthy, but it is part of my ongoing collection and speaks to trauma, colonial violence, and mothering during conflict.

There is much I could write. I have a master’s degree in law where I focused heavily on human rights. I have studied political philosophy at the same level. Utilitarianism, propaganda, and imperialism. The destructive force of capitalism, particularly within the culture industry namely storytelling. Over fourteen years ago I sat with displaced Palestinians and Bedouin in Jordan and listened whilst they detailed the abuses against them, their fears for their families and their rootedness in their ancient lands. I have been to the Holocaust ghetto’s, death camps and memorials across Europe. I have sat in on the trials of those prosecuted for a state sponsored terror, torture, and murder campaign in Argentina. I grew up in the north of Ireland during the tail end of the conflict. My family have been subject to terror, human rights abuses and violence in Belfast, I have been subject to sectarian violence during ‘peace’ time. There is much I could write. But I won’t, not here, I’ll stick to the folklore and the land you come for, I’ll stick to love and humanity, because that too is deeply political and there, in deep community, with shattered healing heart it will liberate us all.

We are deep in Samhain now. In collective grief, in a collective unveiling, the bare bones of winter showing the truth of the world. We are in the darkness, navigating blindly and yet, here is fertile soil, here amongst the dead, amongst the seeds of ideas we can dare to dream-in another way. Another world. Today, before tomorrow’s new moon, I offer you Yew, a sacred container for grief and an ancient, holy sanctuary.

Yew

Iúr
Taxus baccata
Taxus baccata ‘fastigiata’ – Irish yew

The yew tree, Iúr, is deeply sacred here in Ireland. Given that it is now most often found in graveyards or sacred places and that its evergreen leaves are so highly poisonous it has long been associated with the dead and the afterlife.

Whilst Ireland is perhaps more famed for its ancient oak woods, Yew was once more prevalent here than anywhere else, this is retained in that many Irish place names translate as places of the Yew. However, Reenadina wood on the Muckross Peninsula is the last remaining native Yew wood on the island.

One of the five noble trees named in ancient Brehon law this slow growing tree can live for thousands of years and has the ability to regenerate itself, it was therefore believed to be immortal and used to mark scared sites or the graves of nobility across Celtic lands. Indeed, the sacred Scottish island of Iona is believed to be named as ‘yew place’. These sacred groves or burials were then taken over by monastic sites and churches with the arrival of Christianity and the trees came to mark their boundaries.

Interestingly the trees were given the same legal status as churches as places of sanctuary and there are many tales in Irish mythology of warriors taking shelter in their branches. The tree is also associated with war and its wood was used to make spears and bows. It was also used to make vast vats to hold mead for warriors’ feasts.

Given its links to sacred places, burial sites, and war it also became associated with land goddesses and through them ideas of sovereignty and kingship. These goddesses are perhaps on a larger scale the Yew clad land of Ireland herself, holding the honourable dead in sacred sanctuary.^[2]  

The entire plant is highly toxic, from its evergreen spines and seeds clad in rosy berries devoured by the birds (the flesh covering the seed is not toxic and can be brewed as shamanic ‘medicine’) to the dust of the wood itself. One year I made wreaths from yew and was violently sick for days due to a tiny amount of residue from the sap on my hands.

As this post is quite long enough for your Sunday, and I am so unable to create as usual I will leave the fiction for next weekend, with that waxing moon. It will be of Yew clad Ireland holding the dead in sanctuary, it will be of Samhain and the dropping of veils. Of grief and ways through the darkness, of the circle of community and the ancestors, great grandmothers of the deepest soil at our backs. It may well be another guided visualisation if that would serve you right now, you can let me know in the comments below.

Sending all my love, may you soften in all the places that you are hurting and know that you are held. We hold this together.

Siobhán Xx

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^[1] Paraphrasing Yeats No Second Troy, in which he disparages Maude Gonne for her involvement in the 1916 Easter Rising, complaining that she helped to convince the Irish working class to rebel against their oppressors.  

^[2] For much more see Niall Mac Coitir Irish Trees Myths, legends & folklore (The Collins Press 2003) pgs 138-145