let me speak of a pearl
the sort that softly gleams
on the neck of a pretty girl
a moon made minute and white.
an opal stone from a mine
of shadows and silver light

there’s a mystery on high
an ancient unknowable word
that translates a star from the sky
and makes the measureless small.
across the folds of velvet space
it sounds the summoning call.

take the coarsest stone
the dullest plainest rock
prepare it a star to enthrone
and essence of argence enclose.
then await the indwelling light
the ineffable word bestows.

this marriage of dust and fire,
is a joining of heaven and earth,
that grace and beauty inspire
not alchemic retorts or stills.
no effort of man creates
it is only the glory that fills.

this splendour of heavenly light
encircles the throat of a girl
where it shines, but not so bright
for her eyes are lit and aglow
and seeing that lambent flame
who could gaze below?

Below the fold is a setting of the Benedictus in Common Metre. It was written to be sung to Lyngham, a beautiful tune often used with “O, for a thousand tongues to sing.”

Blest be the Lord of Israel
For he has set us free,
And raised on high a Saviour King
A prince of David’s line.

His prophets spoke his promised plan:
Our enemy destroyed!
His mercy shown through all the world.
His covenant upheld.

He swore on oath to Abraham
To free us from our foe,
So we might serve him unafraid
For always, purified.

You, child, shall have a prophet’s task,
To make the Lord’s way plain,
For he will save his people’s lives
Forgiving all their sins.

God’s mercy brings the rising sun,
Whose light shines on the dark,
To lead us out from death to life,
And guide our feet to peace.

Georgic
AThe sky lies red on the simple earth,
The dust of men and of age’s weight
That streaks a world in its pristine dawn
And silence licks all the mind from life.

B

War has come upon the peace of death:
Endless joy has feyly burst the stone.
Lurid rust attacks its clarity;
Lilting down, it sinks below the joy.

CIn the jungle no one knows the way,
And before the shifting colours’ truth
There is light in murky water-depth;
But if one can see, then two can dance.

D

Riding on the swells of living,
On the tilting scenes of solemn
Corbies twisting down to make the
Kill but losing water’s cool caress.

EOn mountaintop I heard the call,
The chord, the scintillating drop,
And stern and drawn, there hewn was grown
A tree to light the storm and stress.

F

Tension flies into graceful lines, and
Earth revolves in its clever curves; that
I is angled beyond description:
Look and see where the trunk is reborn.

GThe birth of dew from breeze’s kiss
Beside his strength will make it bloom,
And flying from itself, on wings
Of golden sound, the stone is light.

H

Corded veins arise to see, and their
Youth prevents their scent: a murderous
Melancholy, half-descending from
Eloquence, harbinger of all joy.

IFrom dust to seed, the pillar almost
Confines a life, and birds will sing their
Beloved songs before the end of
The day that dawned so old and ends so young.

The story. One night I woke up after a remarkable dream. All I could recall was the vision, burnt and spare, of a limitless dry red desert, seen from a height. In the middle of my field of sight was a great tree, much like an oak, with spreading verdant branches. Looking at it from the side, I saw that this was no tree I had seen before. For the living trunk descended into a pool of water, and as it passed through the water became a pillar of grey stone that was rooted in the lifeless stone at the bottom of the pool. I decided to write a poem about this tree. Two connected strands of meaning fly through the poem:

1. the tree as the life of a man, mine, sprung into life in a desert by living water; hence
2. the stone in the desert, struck by Moses, which gave out water–the same stone described as Christ, who died on a tree in order that the tree-kingdom of heaven might grow to a height that birds could shelter in its branches.

So here are some roads through the poem:

1. Through the even stanzas (B, D, F and H), acrostics describe the movement from water to life, the story of the scene: Well, Rock, Teil (lime-tree), Cyme (cluster of flowers).
2. Within the story-telling stanzas, those words tell a slightly different story.
   1. B: Stone resists the attack of the water of life, destroying, dissolving the stone. Like life-giving acid it destroys barriers; little flakes of the hard outer skin of the stone break away and filter gently down to the floor of the pool.
   2. D: The eye moving upward, the spiral of these flakes–each a rock in its own right, and just as hard and unyielding and lifeless–is like the carrion-crows, as alive as such as they could be, disorienting and deathly.
   3. F: Suddenly (not in time but in understanding) the eye is caught up to the straight column of stone that is suddenly curved–cold straight rock-flesh yielding to organic and ineffable curve, at some indefinable point changed and enlivened.
   4. H: From the smoothness of the stone, the tree-trunk’s veins throb, and extend to the little capillaries of the flowering tree, but no water flows through, not yet for this new born tree, and a strange sadness descending echoes the movement of the flakes of stone below, but only half echoes it, for change is on the way, and joy with it.
3. Still within the even stanzas, observe the pattern of life in water to life in tree:
   1. ‘Ēndlĕss jōy hăs fēyly būrst thĕ stōne.’ A strange completeness marks the first stanza. Propositional truths. Battle cries. A silence after each line. This is not organically whole, but there is no weakness, no space.
   2. ‘Ōn thĕ tīltĭng scēnes ŏf sōlĕmn.’ This is meant to be read a little too rhythmically — death’s cycle. It never ends. Line flows into line, into line, into line. Slippery like spiraling specks.
   3. ‘Eārth rĕvōlves ĭn ĭts clēvĕr cūrves; thăt.’ Order begins to come to the metre, but without the same rigidity that has symbolised stony death. Life is at work here.
   4. ‘Yoūth prĕvēnts theĭr scēnt: ă mūrdĕroŭs.‘ Will we recover the excellence of the first rhythm? That final feminine ending is almost there–one more stanza would do it, but we don’t get the chance to hear it, for the poem ends first.
4. Now in the two, enfolding stanzas, first and final (A and I) , read a simple setting for the poem. Sky. Dust. But the dawn of a new age. Silence–but life? At the end, read a pillar, a stoneling sprung from the dust of the desert, each flower giving birth a seed. Creation renewed in the evening, and the promise of more to come. Inaugurated eschatology.
5. In the three odd stanzas in the middle, word plays and emotion pictures.
   1. C: Have we just seen flecks of stone floating down in dark water, almost lightless, green with blocked sunlight? Then see the jungle, matted, close, unfamiliar, colours shifting as the sun filters green from canopy above. But if there is any light at all, there is space for dancing life. One Two, One Two.
   2. E: Is our eye raised to a pillar stretching to the sky? Then place ourself on the granite mountain to hear an earth-shattering subterranean sound, sturm und drang, storm and stress, stern and drawn, that shears the stone and hews, grows a tree to bring light to darkness and on the people who dwell in darkness.
   3. G: In this still desert, do we feel the first breath of breeze and the taste of moisture in the air? Then see the stone gather itself and spring into the now zephyrous air, flying as a dove, its wings the bell-sound that now is heard underlying all the world.

There is more I would say, but that is by far enough to paint the outlines of the scaffolding. I wonder what it does to the poem?

What would it be like?
to see colours fade, snap back
go grey with flurry, bleed away,
drain.
To see outlines vanish, forms dissolve,
worlds shudder,
empty oscillation and chaos.
To explode with an atom,
fiery in the night,
come to be,
vanish away
sucked to the marrow, curlicues on the fabric of reality.
To hear sound, then nothing, but
ringing silence as
feet slide under the insubstantial earth.

But no, hear the clarion,
see the brightness of glory,
feel the ancient might,
the depth of strength that shoulders the world.

The jewel-like garden of God is enskirt;
A thorny vine twines its writhing approach.
It seemed to me that each one of its fangs
Desired to pierce me, my hands and my side.
Black cloud came over the sky, and a cry
Within the walls, and I trembled in fear.

O the fury I saw as the lightning attacked,
As thunder fell and expended its wrath.
A hungry flame licked around the gate,
Each thorn was ablaze in a moment, and, black,
The vine that closed me out dropped down
To the earth, and I entered by the door.