Poets United Midweek Motif ~ May Day or Walpurgis Night

Midweek Motif ~ May Day  

or Walpurgisnacht

Today's challenge is to write a poem for May Day or to give a poetic account of a celebration that was.

Today is May Day's Eve.  Whether you know May Day as a worker, union member, politician, pagan, Christian or another tradition, it is a day to celebrate loudly.  Yet at various times and places in history one or the other of these celebrations was dangerous. 

You may know it from music or poetry, Mendelssohn, Goethe, or Tennyson. Here are links to Wikipedia's general information on May Day folk celebrations (like Walpurgis Night) and International Workers Day.  

Queen Guinevere's Maying by John Collier, 1900

"For thus it chanced one morn when all the court,
Green-suited, but with plumes that mocked the may,
Had been, their wont, a-maying and returned,
That Modred still in green, all ear and eye,
Climbed to the high top of the garden-wall
To spy some secret scandal if he might ..."

from Idylls of the King: "Guinevere" by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1859).

For me the day marks the end of the poetry challenge for the month of April, the first steps to plans I made all winter and the beginning of What. Is. Next. 

Please:
  

1.      Post your  new  poem on your site, and then link it here.

2.      Share only original and new work written for this challenge. 

3.      Leave a comment here.

4.      Honor our community by visiting and commenting on others' poems.

(The next Midweek motif will be  Children.)

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