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Posts Tagged ‘Christmas’

CHRISTMAS NIGHT, CHRISTMAS MORNING

The moon strides through mist.

He is one: half-dead, half-reborn.

The garden is all jet and water –

The black shadow that is time and space.

There is no truth here but stories,

Is what we learn if we live long enough.

The river in its shroud, past the silent graveyard.

Nothing for you to do but weep and sing,

Says the sighing pines.

Nothing but to find beauty here and sing it,

Says the sighing pines.

And the stars look down in envy.

They would fold their wings and walk

These muddy, leaf-strewn paths.

They would feel the cold air of morning,

Let go of hope and fear,

Sing with sun and sparrows.

Would build their small fires,

Feast on emptiness and fullness.

Eternity weaving clothes for itself.

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ADVENT

Bran’s tousled head hangs eloquent
From every night-burned alder.

Rust red are the wounded bracken hillsides,
Sour the long sedge.

Steep is the road,
All distance vapour.

Every hedge, a calligraphy of secrets
Taught by italic rains, slanted weather.

The trees stripped to syllables,
Each a sharp tongue and a scourge for empty vastness.

All glory hidden,
Sunk into the small, warm hearts of huddled things.

In barn and byre,
A shuffled silence,

Summer days mulled over,
Scented green against the cold.

Anointed, we are, with slow light,
Awaiting an older cermony:

A star in the east.
A sure opening and a soft, certain closing.

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CHRISTMAS CAROL SERVICE

What we refuse to see, we dream.
What we refuse to dream, grows strong.
The roots and stones we rest on, groan.
By day and night our laborious weight increases.
Mass and energy, the great fall, the future rise.
Reconstructed are our histories, our reasons.

It is the bones that remain.
It is the bones we clothe
With fragments of colour,
Rouge and tinsel.
They mock us who
Do not delight in story
(Failing to see they, too, live enfictioned).

The essentials of life are child-like.
Delightful is the minute and the hour of silence.
Sustaining is the simple breath, the still gaze.
Listen, not even the stars, not even they, shuffle nor stir:
The middle of the night coagulating cold.

No thing can be blamed for this,
No thing blessed.
No distinction, no judgement.
An infinite web of choosing there is,
An eternity of outcomes.
Each path, unsigned, is sought out,
Followed.
No goal but a calling home.

We have lost elegance.
We have lost the subtle shades.
Our cochlear spirals numbed
In loud foolishness, indocrinated false memories.
Sleight of hand – the key always was and will be, distraction.
Watch the bright light, the movement of the shiny.
The doctrine of no ghosts, neither holy nor profane.

The bones.
It is the bones that shape us.
The bones of the ancestors,
The bones of the children,
The hidden, red-marrowed, singing bones
Inside us.
Mortice and tennon, ball, socket,
Vessel, rope, sinew, glistening cartilage.
The slide and pull of grace.
The dance of staying in one place,
( an interchange of coming and going, being and forgetting to be).

What stirs us,
(I mean to say),
Is the equation of balance.
Number clothed in colour,
Colour clothed in light,
Light clothed in philosophy,
A weighing and positioning of fulcra.
Forgetting that stillness
Is not absence
But presence.

Holographic ideogram,
Mala, a string of meaning,
Where things slip between names,
Where a blink sees more than.
Circumstantial, peripheral,
Ephemeral shall I be.
Beams and motes –
A matter of simple perspective.
The opposite must also be true to itself.

The grinding down of bones,
A fertilising dust.
Tears frozen and thawed,
The watering of life.
Turn out the light, dear,
The stars shall be enough.

—–

There is little logic in the arts of Christmas, nor is there any one cultural imprint. It is a mish-mash of archetypes and long-loved mysterious imagery. Thus this wandering of thought and layering of idea that flowed from finger to page this morning…… Reaching and goodness and redemption though, must surely be worthy ideals to construct neural pathways around. Seasons greetings to all and all.

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