The Sunrise Liturgy. Mia Anderson

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      Shorelight

      It’s shorelight you’re seeing,

      the sky performs a metaphor

      for you

      (like Chaplin putting his bowler hat

      under the bed at bedtime)

      the riverrun of sky this time (every time) being

      our life lived, with banks or berges

      in need of shearing. Did you know

      shore comes from shearing?

      Imagine.

      Dawn’s twilight sees us

      shorn of our matted dreams

      disembarrassed of our shag by our bergers

      and shivering with expectation

      at the fringe of the day

      like sheep

      or else sheep waiting to be driven

      into the flood to wash their wool wool-white

      after the treatment —

      liminal

      Hebridean for now, and blinking at it all.

      So that great band of orange in the sky

      is a sandbank and seems to bank

      the choppily skidding sky

      but it’s your life it’s banking on.

      Really.

      And all our life we’re just part

      of a shore people who were born to this,

      for this.

      We grew up here aquatic apes,

      youngster apelets each of us once

      hanging onto our mother’s every hair

      and she weaving the shallows, the littoral

      a few million years ago.

      Seems like yesterday.

      Hope

      so they say springs eternal but I say

      hope is solid, factive

      it is our all-season all-terrain our

      home and native

      shore

      dawn is the land we thrive in, that’s

      our song its

      theme, shored up here for something

      we know nothing about

      far out and away beyond.

      Dawn

      counts for a lot

      with us, and accounts for a lot

      or so I think I know —

      Shoreline

      Ashes to ashes, snow to snow.

      The ash is a species threatened by the emerald ash borer.

      Ottawa is soon to be denuded of trees by 50%. Ash-bound ourselves

      we are ‘bracing for massive destruction of forests in Ontario and Québec

      in the next fifteen years.’

      Imagine this shoreline without Isolde

      Imogen

      Morgan and

      Beatrice Tristan

      Anselm

      Seraphim and Gregory

      home-brew christenings for ash trees whose arabesques chisel mosaic chips

      into the cloisonné of sky against the bit of fleuve we call home.

      How do without? How not this

      mosaic air on a G string, this gut-bark and blank?

      its seeds of snow horizontal on the vector of wind

      orient express pit-stopped by ash? this kind of

      morning light ‘new every morning’ with ‘the love our wakening

      and uprising prove’?

      What has Love got to do with it

      the blinking out of another of Love’s species?

      Did he who made the lamb make thee? Or did we make the emerald threat?

      The maker of alle thing

      sees with a bigger scan than I can pretend to.

      Take off your sandals, this is holy ground.

      The Church is its members future and past, with the present :

      the communion of saints.

      The Earth is its members future and past, with the present :

      the communion of species.

      Does the Head of the Body have a choice? Or does he,

      did he, give it to us?

      Is it something we said? We apologize.

      Where do we sit at ease — if ease is allowed — in the present; where

      is the still small voice, the true north of this turning, this

      world, your cell that teaches you everything?

      How put the rest back into the rest of it? Bared of limbs

      whose amputation from Love’s body bares our souls’ grievance, how

      best comport the limbs left us?

      How bear it

      unbearing them?

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