.................................................................

We wake to the rumbling thunder of blood,

Pumping hearts, twisted hearts, this shadow and I

Squeeze into the thick silences of trees.

Now the dark lights of Christmastide afflict us

Twilight memories drift, flux and flicker

In this breeze of time,

Penumbra-beginning, hologram-end,

Such pungent affirmations, slip into the past:

Generations of suffering: eyes lifted to a cross, a crescent, a menorah,

Yearnings spilling onto the page of history:

Promises made and never kept.

Out of time’s descent;

In the beginning was the word.

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,

Time ebbs, flows:

Means

To an end.