The Sunrise Liturgy. Mia Anderson

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      Imagine knowing.

      Imagine denominations of trees, confessions of mammals

      covenants of birds and

      sects of lost insects, vestigial limbs of Church

      withering joyfully away

      that they may be One.

      The scientific writing’s on the wall ready for dream analysis :

      this is not forever. Ashes to ashes.

      Thou thy worldly task hast done,

      Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;

      Golden lads and lasses must

      As chimney sweepers come to dust.

      When God shall be all in all, it is home that we’ll be — ash and all.

      Imagine knowing that.

      ‘I repeat myself’

      ‘I repeat myself’

      says the sun

      boring his audience with yet another

      rise, another up, another

      new, fresh, another

      chance, another certain sure.

      Tautology, redundancy :

      there are things

      not smiled upon

      in business or

      grammar or poetry.

      Or poetry?

      We don’t say

      the same thing

      over and over?

      You don’t say.

      Tell me another.

      The wallpaper

      of our lives is just one darn

      novelty after another.

      Shall we agree

      to accept

      pattern for pattern, up for up for up,

      salute the drop drop drop this

      endless wearing of us

      down to down to

      down to nothing is?

      Poetry

      sun

      repeating.

      In the gloaming

      If you’re on the north shore

      you face south.

      You’re a sunrise people.

      Others will have to hymn the sunset; the best we can do is

      our Phos hilaron as light’s shadows crumple, falling from

      the hump-backed frozen waves before our sunrise eyes, definition lost

      to the brush of twilight from this shore to far shore

      to those southerners who face north.

      Nightfall and the snow is clean erased, tabula

      almost rasa before the… uh, onset of the

      fearful green

      of the neighbour’s sick glare, his

      garage lamp! — joyless carnaval against the bogey dark

      to chase away… what? Mutinous deer?

      Piratizing porcupine?

      A skunk à l’école buissonnière?

      Our woods’ creatures,

      his green glare.

      We go to bed at eight now of a night :

      Nothing of us that doth fade

      but doth suffer a fleuve-change

      into something rich and strange

      into a people that sleep and wake

      with spring of day

      who once began work when the midnight telephone stopped

      and who now drop with the quick dark

      apart from

      some star-gazing

      some moon-gazing

      some listening to the intense silence

      some glaring of the green, the emerald threat

      the evil eye.

      Some glaring at it, exchanging hexes.

      Snow’s complicit with sun, snow’s sun’s hireling;

      the shepherd has a stand-in, he can go off to the banquet

      and the snow

      will light us woollums with surrogate light all night,

      stay us with second-hand sun.

      Québec’s gloaming.

      Our eyes go roaming in the gloaming, feasting on the inhering light

      …even the darkness is no darkness with thee,

      but the night is as clear as the day:

      the darkness and light to thee are both alike.

      Green has its place.

      Thumbs, frogs, lily pads, croquet hoops, lawn clippings, tea, old

      orange peels on the compost heap, tall lime drinks, banking cooperatives,

      jewellers’ visors, zippers, old leather tomes, old study lamps, Copenhagen

      copper rooves, carpets in bedrooms, sheets with СКАЧАТЬ