The Sunrise Liturgy. Mia Anderson

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Day within.

      How dawn

      Look. Look. You see?

      — how dawn

      like a benign flesh-eating disease

      invades the shrinking dark,

      devours.

      The dark shrinks, cowers

      behind small objects,

      huddles, hurls itself

      away from tall trees, the lawn’s

      a line-up of escapees.

      It does no good.

      Like Mr Todd.

      The sun will trump you every time, Mr

      Wind-Who-Would blow Todd’s coat off.

      It doesn’t work that way.

      Sun beams, it beams.

      Dawn. Coats off.

      And the dark is gone.

      There. See?

      Think when it began, when you

      could not be sure whether

      light had begun or your dream continued.

      The benign infection advanced cell by cell

      into the body of night, till you could not tell

      if you could see

      or you could not see.

      But you could.

      The infarction of love.

      Poor dark night. It happens every time.

      Mixed message

      Half past dawn for us mixed mortals

      and the frozen birch tree is doing as good a job

      of feeding the grosbeaks as the frozen apple tree.

      When they swirl away from their délices de sorbet aux pommes

      (McSorbet) in the winter sun

      they head for the top of the birch and snack on its catkins.

      Of the five, two

      have red breasts, sharply V-shaped sharp red and

      they are pecking themselves, those two,

      strenuously pecking their breasts…

      can this really be grooming?

      Isn’t that blood they’re feeding on? ’Struth!

      I know it’s cold out, but.

      Ah, they fly away, with the others,

      as living as ever.

      Flip the pages. The rose-breasted grosbeak… sure enough

      a V like a dagger in the chest.

      Have you heard the one about the pelican?

      Mother pelican performs own breast surgery, beak like a dagger,

      feeds its young

      with gobs of its own blood.

      Have you heard the one about the pelican chick?

      An insurance chick gets laid, one egg alongside the favoured egg

      and when the favoured egg hatches and thrives

      the ‘insurance chick’ gets pushed out of the nest.

      That’s it for the chick.

      For this it came.

      So which is for real?

      Both are. Different iconographies.

      In the Other Book it’s the iconography of fittedness —

      multiple wasted experiments of how to get along in this world.

      A zero sum game,

      it worked for pelicans.

      Pelican so loved the world

      that she gave her other begotten one, to the end.

      Now all that believe in Pelican

      shall not see ‘Pelican’ perish but have persistent life.

      In the book that’s called The Book, it’s science lesson 101

      before the burning bush : ‘Turn aside.’

      See why the branches are not consumed.

      ‘Wisdom :

      attend!’

      Asidedness.

      The grosbeak as burning bush

      step one on the marathon of self-offering

      that burns and burns and is not consumed.

      The iconography of cathedral glass, bronze, stone,

      Latin’s Pie Pelicane, the ancient christic image.

      And we : in the image, we say. Pelicans unlimited.

      ‘We offer and present unto thee… ourselves, our souls and bodies,

      to be СКАЧАТЬ