12 Towards A Definition of the Seasons by Duncan MCGibbon (free e reader .TXT) 📕

knows his weaknesses
Even as a child she had learned
to fear, his quiet, cold moods,
the sudden illnesses,
his irritable un earned
violence, a strategy to destroy
independence of thought
in those who knew him.
Yet she sees fear in those
clever, domineering eyes.

Once she had been poet and heroine.
She had put on Scudery
for Richelieu and asked, with others,
for her father to be discharged
from his debts, a classical Salome,
kneeling before a Christian Herod.

If she recoiled within when those worldly
lips consented, like a bee drunk on the pollen,
of his own power and pleasure.
She would be heroine, but not the poet
of her vocation, despite Corneille.

When she heard the sound of his return
in the hallway, she knew she had the cue
for her announcement. He would hurt
as a child is hurt. helpless and angry.
this man incapable of friendship except
with gamblers, natural philosophers,
priests and mathematicians.
was to lose his only close companion.

Later that night, hearing him cry,
She tried to comprehend
the mystery of sundered friendship.
and the gusts of grace on humans
gibbeted on the iron curse of sin.
She remembered he had
not touched his soup.

She knew she had to be where
she could not pick up a pen,
except in service of edifying prose.
Her freedom now, a pleasure no longer
but the Lord’s pleasure, His pleasure
denying pleasure as unpleasant necessity.

By her fasting
and her austerities
which caused her to
move stiffly.
Sometimes
slowing down
her energies
to a complete stop
to carry on
suddenly breathless
and pressured,
no longer so warm,
so self-assured.

She remembered that night in Clermont
an owl screeched in the woods,
long and low. From her window
she saw its plastic and measured flight
and drew breath at the stratagems
of the earth that breeds the owl
and breeds its victims.
at how His cruel will alone
can fix his love.
Can make and amend our end.
Tomorrow she told herself,
“I leave for Port Royal.”


Christmas ; Ten Triolets, A Carol, Two Hymns and A Chant
 

1.A fair, young girl
says a mother’s prayer
where fog and mists swirl.
A fair, young girl,
where snow and ice curl
for her child, thread-bare;
a fair young girl,
for her child, thread-bare.

2.He comes so still
into our split night,
The world waits to kill.
He comes so still,
our void to fill.
A child without might.
he comes so still
A child without might

3.Walking so slowly
you wouldn’t believe it,
to a place so lowly
Walking so slowly
a couple so holy.
We couldn’t receive it.
Walking so slowly,
we couldn’t receive it.

4.A maiden’s form
has been taken whole,
a face so warm,
a maiden’s form
creates the norm:
his saving role.
A maiden’s form
his saving role.

5.Helpless you come
to our cave of shame.
The earth is too dumb.
Helpless you come.
The earth is too numb
to grasp Your aim.
Helpless you come
to grasp Your aim.

6.Others will walk here,
even in the dark,
despite the chill of fear.
Others will walk here
to shed a tear,
to find His ark
Others will walk here,
to find His ark

7.What else can I do?
Now the skies have torn
and all is seen as true.
What else can I do?
but follow You
where love is born
What else can I do?
where love is born.

8.Your Word comes back.
to make the world its own
and find the hidden track.
Your Word comes back
to comfort our lack,
a promise we have known.
Your word comes back
a promise we have known.

9.No ecstasy of nature
brought such joy.
No clever culture,
no ecstasy of nature
no school of nuture
brought this sacred boy
No ecstasy of nature
brought this sacred boy.


10. He opens a door
on a mother and child.
As promised before,
He opens a door
to sunder the law,
though we are beguiled.
He opens a door,
though we are beguiled


Hymn

Father, I ask You
by all that is true,
that all may be one,
as I am your Son.

You are the heeded
you are the needed,
you are the jewel
in love’s well-wrought rule. (Chorus)

No love stronger,
no union greater,
than now to perish
my friends to cherish.

From this last border,
I send my order
to love as I love,
as love from above.

Do my will and know
that love’s light will grow.
I am your lover.
I am no other.

Show through your Spirit,
all shall inherit
all are invited
all are united.

For God loved the earth
so much it was worth
the loss of His Son,
so that all be one.

Now speak Christ’s power,
the fruit of His hour.
Love is the flower
that never tastes sour.

So the world may know,
You sent signs below,
as the Father sends me.
Those who taste will see

it is life they eat
new life for themselves,
as the grain of wheat
is where God indwells..

Carol

Christ-child, we welcome you to us.
We welcome you back to our homeless hearts.

Mother, we comfort your sorrow:
we comfort the sadness the old man foretold.

Christ-child we want you to smile now,
we want you to smile with your soft, tiny mouth.

Mother we ask you to hold him:
now you have swaddled his cold, naked form.

Christ-child we know you are fragile,
yet we know that the nebulas burn for you.

Mother we ask you to trust us
as God trusted you with this shelter of love.

Christ child we know you are speechless,
teach us your silence to hear your word.

Hymn

We sing out to you Lord,
in Spirit one,
for Christ within is word
Your Son, our host, our guest.

In Christ’s living water
we are made whole:
the soul’s fresh laughter,
our type, our seed, our breath.

We are Christ’s’ listeners,
whose speech builds our Church
and makes us his missioners,
his voice, his feet, his hands.

Christ is our holy one
whose call we hear today
in Him all fear is gone,
our hope, our creed, our passion.

Chant

Where the lustful pull down
the smoke from skies.

Pull down, pull down.

for prayer dies with them
in the field of beasts,

with them, with them.

God’s ecstasy endures
a triple nothingness.

endures, endures

In the voices’ hunger
for hatred and rage,

hunger, hunger

Make God your passion
and exile your heart:

passion, passion

and in the field of light.
make a true parish

of light, of light.


Equilux
 

1. Prevarications

Work still claims its appetite
to feed on self-esteem.
It throws us the cut of love
to chew on and exercise

canine salivation by wraith alone,
lest we relapse into active obesity.
I had cut the week, claiming
a skin infection, having lost,

as usual, to the Arts Council
muses, and flailed submissions.
The Apollonine patricians
plead simple boredom

to spend time in other people’s houses
and make a Duino out of sick-leave.
The lament this season
being the death of paternalism

with you, the new professional girl,
gullible to a father-figure.
You snap into regulation iceberg,
once the kissing ceases to be


less economic with reality
and offer lifts to the neighbours,
reading Einstein to fill time
in the Western corridor.

Heathrow fills with bric à brac
While from behind a facile
hoarding, a shy man
patrols with an armalite.

You are nervous at the check-in,
with staff on overtime,
checking to see if
I am in the blue book,

obsessed with bugging
and the odour of explosives.
An impatience creeps in
even among the waxworks.

We settle to watch
the business flyers
take their lounge.
The women shoulder

the awkward curve
that bottoms out
too slowly and hardens to
cellulite uncertainty.


The men handle
only the deals
that dreams
are paid on.

3. Flight

Cautious, out of town development
in Weybridge, or Staines
gives way to an Arctic wind, stumbling over
the South Downs, the houses like

rolling stock from a derailed goods train,
golf courses, sand- pocked and empty,
we ponder the unhappiness of the flesh,
its love affairs, its expensive cars,

its overdrafts and bitchings
too petty to remember,
too cruel to forget,
while we look down on ferry boats

like boxes making towards Havant,
and cloudbanks flocking the Channel
following on cold fronts
further up the shore.

Each cotton fluff glowing
white as burning wool
in the sun of equinox.
to insulate the Bay of Biscay
I listen to Callas, sleepwalking Bellini
while you flick through a glossy
that features “How pornography
saved my marriage.”

Then darkness fell
and our plane, toy-tiny
found a gap in the clouds
to land at Santiago.


4. Galicia

Between the pine-trees
and the hills,
the airport is empty,
growing dark.

Outside, Rosalia Castro’s
“imponente silencio”
is carried through
the stiffened glass.

It is all still here,
marble and gloss,
frozen into public serenity.
while stunted oak trees

gather on picture window
hillsides, like children for a fight,
We are almost alone
in a palace of arrival

and return with new fear,
waiting among polish
and disappoint
with suspect’s photographs

displayed like icons
to the saints of the ETA
who shot Blanco.
stricken in the ecstasy

of multiple identities.
We are checked off
and checked on
labelled for security and night.


6. Vuelo de noche

Under our feet now
a black sheet of sky.,
shields out,
torn and pocked
by village lights,
forest-fires and
the heart-beat
of navigation lights.
The chatter of the English
on tour, Beatrix Potter
in Spain, evangelising only
for animal liberation.
Suddenly,
we remember
we are going somewhere
to act out the husk
of togetherness
and want to pretend
we don’t pretend.

7.Seville.

Night holds hands
with shadows
in a garden
of engineered dreams.
Pavilions float
by the mud
that channels the mystery
of unforeseen sadness.
We wander past
the amorous young,
scattered with oranges
thick coats and darkness.

It is pre-carnival spring.
Cold, pure air processes
from the Guadalquivir,
as we circle
the Church’s territory,
Giralda and basilica,
bounded by Roman columns
and iron clamps and claims.

We eat in the arched
Mozarabic baths
among the people
of Bunuel,
grave bourgeois