DARK: TWO SMALL FLAMES

I wrote this poem many years ago when I was living in New Haven, Connecticut (New Haveners will recognise East Rock). I feel much more positive about Advent now, and wouldn’t write it in this form again; but its wariness and reluctance “not to turn again” echo what I know many others do feel. So, as it may strike some sympathetic sparks, I print it again, as I did last year on a previous blog.

This is the penitential season:

walking home gingerly amid thaw’s debris

you will be met by snuffling, mournful winds,

doubtful travellers from lands

they have not understood, and bearing

rumours that do not inform, serving

only to disquiet. The melting rock

above the city holds no surer news

among its fissures; and altogether

the only certainty is a growing conviction

that soon, soon, the sins you have forgotten

will visit you, settling themselves in your chairs with the thin

worn faces from the pages you turned over.

Is a mind finely attuned

to minor comforts evidence of prison?

If so, this is the day the gates close

behind you; bewildered among the well-aimed spring

of traffic, you stand in an ill-cut suit of thoughts

outside. Free.

And as you meekly walk the way

they pointed out, to your ordained salvation,

the crinkly face of a warder shines

out of a shadow, and for an instant

the workshop’s warmth is curled around your shoulders.

The punishment is freedom.

And as the days crawl on

the sponge looms that will wipe your slate

of all the small warm sins you have committed

and place you, in your salvation suit –

in which, you suspect, you will look ridiculous –

on uplands made for angels, alone.

There really is no other way, it seems;

the rumours the wind mongers are probably true;

and all you can pray for as your home,

unsuited to heaven, crumbles under the lash,

is (mean to the last) that it will be worth it:

meaning, somehow, that what you were told

will all be true and that the land to which,

a shivering refugee, you must embark

will be as good as it seems featureless.

And pray, of course, that if so –

if, naked, you stumble, pierced and pinned

by pains of joy too great for your wretched frame –

your new, untested, fledgling salvation

will bear you at such heights.

The light we have enshrined

and intertwined with pagan hopes

may yet explain this fearful overturning:

but today there are only two small flames

alight – which is not much

to travel by.