Virgo

At last, the stars are beginning to break through the rain clouds and illuminate the nights. Few scenes are as beautiful as those evenings when the tar-black silhouettes of trees stand stark against a sky of scattered buttermilk clouds and pinprick stars on a navy blue sheet. I could spend - I do spend - a fair amount of time sitting in the dark, watching the night sky. It's a very slow, steady sort of beauty. What could be more reliable than the night? Even if the Sun were to burn out and the Moon to escape the Earth's pull, we would still have the comforting darkness and solitude of night.


Virgo

You tread the courses of the sky,
arrayed about in vestal light
and utter as the arrant night
encompassed in your eye,

so youthful in your starry mien,
and yet as ancient as the gears
that guide the everlasting spheres
you gallivant between,

inscrutable to every soul
but mine alone, when I may bear
your beauty, singularly rare
and singularly whole,

and so we two shall intertwine
the earth and heavens in a wreath
that crowns the slumbering, beneath,
and humbles the divine

and makes, of us, a unity,
as man and oread are wed
to walk the orbits overhead
and anchor in the sea,

where we may find a solitude
untroubled by the taint of grief
and linger in our sweet relief,
unceasingly renewed.

Beloved

In the last several years, I have read quite a bit of modern metrical poetry (if such a dichotomy can be said to exist), and have found in it an unfortunate and almost universal tendency toward gracelessly long line lengths. It is rare enough to find ten syllables per line (though this still manages to hang on in the Shakespearean sonnet), and anything less is almost non-existent. Such wordiness is usually nothing but a crutch. That is, it can be quite difficult to express cogent thoughts in brief lines, and is far easier to let lines tend toward sentence-length, then tack on some quick rhymes at the very end. What is lost in this lengthy-line format, however, is the sense of rhythm and cadence that allows a poem to dance like a leaf on the wind, march like a battalion on parade, or whirl like an elegant waltz. Consequently, most modern metrical poetry has all the finesse of a 12-gauge shotgun. How I wish that we could find our way back to the grace of language we once had.


Beloved

Beloved, consort of my soul,
you bare your heart,
unburdened of its bitter toll
by tender art
that marries, in a perfect whole,
the wanting part.

And in the greater aggregate,
these scarlet cords,
as lithe as fawns, as consummate
as cultured lords,
shall take a taste and pay a debt
that common words

cannot suffice. What interstice
is left unlit?
And what allure of this bliss
could I remit?
I find no former that I miss,
so let them flit

and fly away upon the air
of eras past.
Beloved, what sublime and rare
belief is cast
before us, in an answered prayer
of love, at last.

Migration

The sun has returned, and so have the birds. Every morning, they call out from branch to branch as if it were the first day of creation, which, in a sense, it is. On a separate note, I only recently noticed that, until today, the last post on my blog concerned Ash Wednesday, and the first, Easter. How odd, to see the entirety of Lent encompassed in one little place.


Migration

I never thought that I
was like unto a bird;
my wings are not as spry,
my warble rarely heard,

and though we both escape
our customary nest
when Winter strokes the nape
and clutches at the chest,

my bird will come upon
the turning of the year,
while I am fled and gone
and loath to reappear,

and so I shall abide,
and never bird to be;
he travels as the tide;
I linger in the sea.

If You Were...

It's Easter Vigil, and the long 40 days of Lent have come to an end. I hope you all are looking forward to Easter as much as I am. Tonight begins the happiest celebration of the year, so be well, and I wish you all a joyful Easter season.


If You Were...

If you were as old as a hill
or endlessly deep as a sea,
as rash as a childish will
or stoic and straight as a tree...

If you were as sad as a keen
or vital and quick as a jig,
as fragrant as flourishing green
or sweet as a succulent fig...

If you were as soft as a lamb
or grand as a towering height,
as strong as a sinewy ram
or sultry as tropical night...

If you were the soul of the earth,
it still would not capture me through,
but these cannot measure your worth,
for all things and more are in you.