The high, Lapis Lazuli skies of flaming June

Are in absentia in this year's damp and cold

We cannot catch the wind, stillness evades us

And the patterns in the grass do not last

Et in Arcadia Ego...

Come!  take the winding stair into the high tower

High above this turgid land of forgetfulness

Where once upon a golden dawn good faeries

Danced a circle of rare delight within the sight

Of one John Mulligan who, on the last day of August

1938, according to the London Times (6/9/1938),

Met two fairies dancing near Ballingarry in West Limerick.

He later said they were two foot tall, very well read, and descanted

With flair and erudition upon the Kabbalah and the Theosophists

Later, disquisitioning upon the exigencies of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Fallen angels in my head cannot be as close as the magic of the past.

For faeries still mourn the fall of the unicorn and the rise

Of  the cross and crescent. Enchantment comes at such a heavy cost

Only tears will show you the undertow of our old mythologies,

Those aristocracies of thought that bleed into

Soil and leach into the heart:

Where all great art is rooted.