We Have Kept Vigil With Owls
Commoners' Advent, day 18
For Commoners’ Advent, day 18 I am sharing three poems by theologian Richard Bauckham which celebrate the precious light in the winter dark.
First Light
After all the false dawns,
who is this who unerringly paints
the first rays in their true colours?
We have kept vigil with owls
when the occult noises of the night
fell tauntingly silent
and a breeze got up
as if for morning.
This time the trees tremble.
Is it with a kind of reckless joy
at the gentle light
lapping their leaves
like the very first turn of a tide?
Timid creatures creep out of burrows
sensing kindness
and the old crow on the cattle-shed roof
folds his wings and dreams.
Bleary Cows
Nativity scenes grow rarer by the year,
like snow, and in the wake of godliness
the trolls return - with neolithic fear
not quite disguised by grinning ugliness.
*
We miss the question and the cosmic yes,
the oddly reverent goat and the shy goose,
the high and haloed ones, the gentleness
of heaven with earth in Giotto's lights and hues.
*
But still they come, the partridges and pears,
the penguins, pokemons, and polar bears,
the tartan reindeer and old mother time.
*
And like the audience at the pantomime,
"Oh, yes he did!" we yell, "Look, in the sight
of bleary cows - he came and there was light."
Taken from http://richardbauckham.co.uk/poetry/
And this last one, in honour of our little Advent Church of the Shepherd and the Shrew, taken from https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com
The Song of the Shepherds
We were familiar with the night.
We knew its favourite colours,
its sullen silence
and its small, disturbing sounds,
its unprovoked rages,
i#”#ts savage dreams.
*
We slept by turns,
attentive to the flock.
We said little.
Night after night, there was little to say.
But sometimes one of us,
skilled in that way,
would pipe a tune of how things were for us.
*
They say that once, almost before time,
the stars with shining voices
serenaded
the new born world.
The night could not contain their boundless praise.
*
We thought that just a poem —
until the night
a song of solar glory,
unutterable, unearthly,
eclipsed the luminaries of the night,
as though the world were exorcised of dark
and, coming to itself, began again.
*
Later we returned to the flock.
The night was ominously black.
The stars were silent as the sheep.
Nights pass, year on year.
We clutch our meagre cloaks against the cold.
Our aging piper’s fumbling fingers play,
night after night,
an earthly echo of the song that banished dark.
It has stayed with us.
#CommonersAdvent #OldAdvent #CelticAdvent #StMartinsLent #WinterLent
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Lovely poems, thank You for sharing with us