As part of the Creaturemag Festival Edition and inspired by our trip to The Green Man Festival in 2007, we asked the happy people for their interpretations of The Green Man. Some Green Man poetry is included below.
What is The Green Man? The Green Man is that spirit, energy, presence, inherent in every cell of the vegetative realm. The green man has many different faces and variations. Branches or vines may sprout from the nose, mouth, nostrils or other parts of the face, and these shoots may bear flowers or fruit.
The Green man can be found in many cultures around the world, primarily it is interpreted as a symbol of rebirth, or “renaissance”, representing the cycle of growth being reborn anew each spring.
Here are two Green Man poems:
Green Men at Exeter Cathedral
It seems only the green man’s head
looks out from corbels and roof bosses here.
Is this because the green man wears no cover,
only leaves to shield him from our gaze?
Safer to decapitate him,
avoid the problem of his phallus;
which stands, fulsomely, for fertility after all.
By Rose Cook
Old
It’s in the memory of birds this age
The post on which to perch to proclaim mornings glory
The spots of the past where the pickings are richest
The ancestors favourites the old places
It’s in the roots of the trees this age
As they suck, in the leaves as they fall
With some knowledge returning to earth, to roots
To nature, to nurture, to be reborn
It,s in the stones the oldness
The mothers bones exposed less
Where moss and lichens creeping pace paints steadily
And the bird song seems distant like fading memories
By Paul Cook
Click here to see the Green Man Poetry in our 2007 festival edition, accompanied by Green Man Art.
Click here to check out the Green Man interview.
