Advent Lectionary – Day 7 – To Violet, on the first week of Advent

December 6, 2008 at 8:24 pm (advent, babies, christmas, family, father, fathers, happiness, language, parenting, poetry) (, , , , , , , , , , )

To Violet, on the first week of Advent

I
While you sleep, at long last, in what is hopefully a warm room,
the searchlight of a roving mind swings around, time after time.
In the car
on the way home
your mom and I make up a Death Cab for Cutie song:
“Another cold night in Cleveland
in my brown corduroy jacket
I drove alone”
And this is that through which we move, my love.
A mountain range, a peak of which we each are fast approaching,
and as Poincaré before me, I fire light across the distance,
trying to tell you the time.
.
II
1999. Two-by-fours in the barn, ready to go,
I sat with a piece of scratch paper, trying to figure this out:
A regular pentagon contains a rectangle and a triangle;
three-sixty plus one-eighty is … five-forty, which means…
and I couldn’t figure it out then; a little bit of shame in front of my grandfather.
Now, though, a better version of me:
five-forty divided by five is one-oh-eight,
and so each of the five exterior triangles is isosceles
and the paired angles then have angles of…
one-eighty minus one-oh-eight is seventy-two
(which divided by two is thirty-six) and there are
five pairs of those angles, which means that
those angles take up five times seventy-two
is three-sixty degrees of the total interior, which
means the total amount in the points is five-forty
minus that three-sixty,
which is one-eighty,
which you divide by five,
so that each point in a regular star
should have thirty-six degrees.
.

III

Lay me in a bed with amber glow filling the room,
and place the sound of fun outside, ready to start playing
at the moment I am to awake, so that I can lie there
and bathe in vicarious jubilation.
Place me in the back-right of a blue Ram van, driven by
my father, and let us stop at Great Bend or Clarks Summit.
Let me know when we see “Deer Crossing” signs,
so I can count down from ten.
Put me back again in the passenger seat,
with my head in my hands, not yet on paper half the man
I couldn’t quite convince myself to convince them
I would come out to be.
Sit me in the dark, illuminated by punctual flashes,
with you on my lap, and your mother’s warmth behind us,
and the lights of the tree. We bathed in our own jubilation
and you in the middle of us all.
—
So this one I just wrote. Happy Advent!

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Advent Lectionary: Day 6 – BC:AD

December 6, 2008 at 7:43 pm (Uncategorized)

[Edit - I totally wrote this yesterday but my computer's power cable is dying, so I threw up my hands. So tonight, a two-fer.]

BC:AD
by U.A. Fanthorpe (born 1929)

(from Maggi Dawn’s excellent blog)

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.

—–

I wonder if every devout atheist is seized by the urge, when writing something that even remotely, tangentially, or obliquely proclaims the divinity of Christ,–the urge to issue a disclaimer: “I don’t actually believe this stuff; it’s what somebody else said.”

It’s disappointing. I like to think I’m made of thicker stuff than that. But the urge is there.

I just read this poem. It’s wicked good, I think, not so much in that it elevates, but in that it strips the Christmas story down into its constituents parts in such a way that it really makes it clear what is so transcendant and amazing about the story. It’s the original Horatio Alger story, only more so. From rags to riches becomes from rags to divine power and the glory of God.

The title is also nice–as a Westerner, my Gregorian calendar is (at least in intention if not in historical precision) set up such that the birth of the baby Jesus is when the calendar stops being the sequence {-%∞

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