9. Understanding

I find a page at the century's end

where time climbs out of the cosmos

into the petals which fall on my hand.

The wind ruffles my neat book

back to beginnings,

to God who rocked in the bone.

Leaves flap across crystal,

ripple the facets of famine and war,

flutter moon-play over a star

in the grip of the law of substance and work.

There is a diffusion of lives

through the passage of peace

where earth is efficient with lace,

the intricate weave of the prayer shawl.

The heart of matter

holds to its binding:

this woman who sits

in her cool home,

waiting and waiting,

her spindle idle,

reading her book of hours,

while I bring

bitter herbs,

death herbs,

gold.

10. Revelation

The elms are sifted;

wind in the abbey

riffles and whines

through grass, bounces

down to the mad lambs,

their capers, tumbles

in the slumped field

where the river slicks

grey from Yorkshire.

Turning homeward,

long years of ruin,

how new lambs race.

11. Aurora

The lights are quick; they shift above

these hills, the autumn ceiling tight

about its pinning Pole, then flit,

with drifts of northern gods and time

slack in their wake, across these mute

night airs. How rays weave strange tonight,

their fame a falling echo still

of One Flame dancing trim, vibrant

and wise, the full dark down! And how

their sky-wide flare, their crowning, frees

the grace, those jeweled auras soft

to lift the flawed fields’ shade! And this:

the radiance – folding   folding   folding

The Nature of Winter

She  comes, wing-span fanning the trees’

gap, belly a-ghost of twilight and snow:

tall dark shivering in the offing

gathers to smother the living, the land,

while she of the heart-face stands to a hover,

feather-flap slow to roll on still air holding

a pitch of night  - it clutches the clipped

moon, ice crawling through twigs.

Her black eyes angle on white,

talons flared, tense for a flicker of shrew

or vole on the clamped hummock below,

beak snipping on clean space,

dropping for death, all of her moment

mute. A snatch, a turn, wing-back fancy

in pinched light, she flows, flits

to a mote where it’s bleak, raw on the edge.
 

New Year’s Day

Let a first night sleep away the last

before we flounder in pools of unknowing

vast as the year is deep, top waters fast

over shadows dropping to their full past.

Let, there on every mere’s outer, a wind flick

ripples to raging waves churning

thick, debrised sludge caught in the slick

of water-thrash pounding to scrape, scouring quick.

Let there be sediment drifting calm to the base,

waters filtering clear in their sluicing

chase through reed roots to the milfoil’s place

where their lick and lapping fillip a fronding trace.

Let there be light through each quiet lake

stippling down to the perch in its flickering

shake on a gulp of minnow, the gone fry’s wake.

Let there be light when all days break.

Let there be light.