Beltane: Tending the Fire of Desire

Letter Five {Seeds of Poetry} a celebration of connection and aliveness

May 03, 2025

“listen I love you, joy is coming” - Kim Addonizio

Beltane: May 1st

Beltane is one of the great fire festivals of the Celtic wheel of the year. It marks the halfway point between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice; a celebration of fertility, vitality, and the electric charge of life bursting into bloom. The Earth is fully awake now. The sap is rising. The bees are humming. The Maypole is…may-poling?Everything is pollinating, expanding, and thrumming with energy.

This is the moment when the world leans hard into aliveness; when we stop hesitating and start reaching.

In the Celtic tradition, Beltane was a time of ecstatic ritual—leaping fires, sacred unions, and walking between worlds. Livestock were driven between twin bonfires to bless them. Young lovers disappeared into the woods. The veils thinned, not to summon the dead, but to open ourselves to the wild, sacred yes of the Earth.

This is the holiday of embodied blessing.

When the world feels numb

Let’s be honest: many of us are burnt out. Not the crisp, clean burn of ritual fire, but the slow, smoldering erosion of modern life. We are inundated with grief, injustice, and noise. We scroll and scroll and feel less and less.

Desire feels risky. Joy feels indulgent. Connection feels fleeting.

But friend, Beltane reminds us: our joy is not frivolous. Our desire is not shameful, and our pleasure is not optional.

Beltane says: you are not here to wither quietly.
You are here to emerge.

You are here to explore the visceral, awkward, ecstatic territory of intimacy.

Tending the Fire

Now is the time to ask: What lights you up? What brings color back to your cheeks? What do you long for in your bones?

Desire is holy.
Pleasure is sacred.
Joy is a portal to resistance and resilience.

You don’t have to run through the fields naked (though you certainly can), but do something that connects you to the spark within. This is not the slow ember of Imbolc, this is the wild, dancing flame of Beltane.

Poetic Prompts for Beltane:

🔥 Create from heat – Write a poem from the voice of your desire. Let it be honest, lush, strange, holy. Let your longing speak.

🔥 The mess of wanting - Write a poem that captures the sweat, the uncertainty, the stammering. Let it be sacred anyway.

(Begin with the phrase “I wanted to say…” and let the poem unravel from there.)

🔥 an Imperfect Kiss
Think of a kiss that was not perfect—but memorable. The one that tasted like gum or smoke or rain. Try using second person: “You kissed me like…” to heighten intimacy.

🔥 Things I couldn’t say out loud
Make a list of things you never said to someone you desired, feared, or lost. Let each line begin with “I never told you…”

Then break into a single long sentence of everything that still wants to be said.

🔥 The body recalls
Kim Addonizio writes poems where the body remembers even what the mind denies. Write from the body’s memory - What does your skin know? What do your teeth, your knees, your palms remember?

I’d love to see your poems! Tag me and/or share in the comments!

The work we do here

In seasons of oppression and exhaustion, joy becomes radical, creativity becomes resistance, and connections become sacred acts of defiance.

Whether you are a parent, an artist, a healer, a caretaker, a quiet watcher of bees—you matter. Your work, seen or unseen, feeds the world.

To those of you who support this space, thank you. Earth & Verse exists because of you.

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With warmth and wild fire,
Alix