We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,
Pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I
Squeeze into the silences of trees.
Now the dark lights of Christmastide afflict us,
Twilight memories drift, flux, flicker
In this breeze of time.
Penumbra-beginning, hologram-end, my friend,
Such pungent affirmations,
Whispered in the dark,
Slip so easily
Into generations of suffering:
Eyes lift to a cross, a crescent, a menorah,
Yearnings spill onto the pages of history:
Promises made and never kept.
We tumble
Out of time’s descent;
In the beginning is the end, my friend:
The sacred apartness of the intelligible:
Fragments of the blood,
Firing in the brain,
The body, a holy place again.
This tinder-box of meaning
Flares,
Ebbs,
Flows,
Means to an end.