Poets’ Corner: Rosemerry on All Souls’ + Halloween!

29 Oct Poets’ Corner: Rosemerry on All Souls’ + Halloween!

Below please find a poem for the All Souls’ and Halloween written by Word Woman Rosemerry Trommer. Also a few fun facts about the ancient happening and what followed: Halloween.

All Souls’ & Halloween

Hauntings are part of Telluride’s local lore. Ghosts are known to make their presence felt in some of Telluride’s favorite, well, haunts: the New Sheridan Hotel; the Telluride Historical Museum for two spooky examples. In the 19th century, ghosts were known to party in the hospital-turned-Museum; in the Silver Belle Building; and he cemetery (Duh). At Halloween, in town and everywhere else the notion of “ghosting” takes on a new meaning” and “ghost” reclaims its original definition.

As for the holiday…

Long before plastic skeletons and fun-size candy bars, the turning of October into November was a serious matter. In ancient Ireland it marked Samhain, roughly “summer’s end,” when herds came down from the high pastures, the harvest was counted, and the dark half of the year began. Medieval Irish tales describe it as a hinge in time, when the burial mounds opened and the dead, and stranger things, could walk among the living. Fires were lit and feasts laid. Some families set a place at the table for those who were gone.

The Church built its own season of remembrance on the same stretch of the calendar. In the eighth century Pope Gregory III dedicated a chapel in Rome to all the saints on November 1, and within a hundred years All Saints’ Day was observed across the Frankish empire. Around 998, Abbot Odilo of the great Burgundian monastery at Cluny set aside November 2 for praying for all the faithful departed. That became All Souls’ Day, a day for the ordinary dead rather than the canonized ones. The night before All Saints, All Hallows’ Eve, slowly contracted into “Halloween.”

The tidy story is that the Church planted its feasts on Samhain to absorb it. Historians are less sure. The November 1 date may have come from England and Germany as much as Ireland. The likelier truth is a long, untidy blending: Christian prayers for the dead layered over older ideas about a season when the boundary between worlds thins. Folk custom did what doctrine didn’t, and the bonfires, masks, door-to-door begging and fortune-telling games carried through. Irish and Scottish immigrants brought the mix to America, where it became the holiday we know. In Mexico it fused with Indigenous traditions to become Día de los Muertos.

Strip away the costumes and the core idea endures. For a few nights each year, we make room for our dead. That room doesn’t have to be a cemetery or a candlelit ofrenda. As Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer reminds us in the poem below, written on the morning of November 2, it can be the quiet minutes before we open our eyes. Our thoughts become the altar, and the people we’ve lost find their way in with the dawn.

Waking on Day of the Dead
November 2, 2024 by Rosemerry

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Courtesy the artist.

Eyes still closed, the world
still dark, in my mind
I name my beloveds
no longer here
and my thoughts
become an altar.
I imagine each of their faces,
each of their voices,
surround them with snapdragons
and calendula, smooth stones
and white feathers.
Eventually dawn slips in
as if to light inner candles.
How does it do that, the light?
How does it enter me even
when the eyes are closed?
The dead, too, seem
to find their way in.
I linger with them.
It is beautiful.
When I finally open my eyes
the salt from the altar
has spilled all over my pillow.

Halloween, a few fun facts:

• The first jack-o’-lanterns were turnips. In Ireland and Scotland, people carved turnips and beets. Irish immigrants in America found pumpkins much easier to work with.
• Trick-or-treating started as “souling.” In medieval Britain, poor people and children went door to door offering prayers for the dead. In return they received small spiced “soul cakes.”
• Scotland had “guising.” Disguised young people performed a song, poem or joke and were paid in food or coins. This is where “costume” first met “candy.”
• “Trick or treat” is surprisingly new. The phrase first turned up in print in a 1927 newspaper in Alberta, Canada.
• Party games were about love. Bobbing for apples, peeling an apple in one long strip, and gazing into a mirror at midnight were all meant to reveal a future spouse.
• Candy corn dates to the 1880s. It was first sold as “Chicken Feed,” and its colors were meant to look like kernels of corn.
• Houdini died on Halloween in 1926. Fans have held séances on October 31 ever since, hoping he’ll make one last escape.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, more: