Five Hundred Hours of Midnight

 

Five hundred hours of midnight 

Would not count my paces ere the dawn

Back and forth I walk and wonder

How God will tear the sky asunder

Rend the storm and come down. 

Stand, you weak-kneed children of commerce

Find your fire and stand! 

If not here, backs to the last patch of daylight, 

Facing the oncoming sheet of midnight

If not now, then where?

Your fathers were fat and lazy cowards

Who hesitantly raised a flag against the world

And stood, with scowls at their own achievement

Humbled emperors in their raiment

Laid low the mighty in their hour in heaps untold

But for all their failings; greed, avarice and shame, 

They clasped their swords with hands unyielding

Fought and lost and were sent reeling

And fought again and won, this little land

And we who eat from vineyards we did not tend to

And fields we did not sow

Now found again where they left it:

A rusty sword, a defunct musket

And the call to march, and stand!

The Girl with the Shy Smile

Around the new years, when I was beginning to think that beauty was something we invented to survive as a species, a young woman crept up on me without warning and taped this poem to a hole in my sleeve. I wasn't able to get her name, but I think I will recognize her if I see her again, by the way she smiles. 

Her eyes are clear like crystal,

Her brows are straight and true,

Her lips are as full as the summer moon,

and as soft as the summer dew. 

She wears a shirt of satin, 

and a jacket of dark green,

and she walks beneath the shadowed trees

wherever a star is seen. 

 

I dreamt that I walked with her,

and she whispered words to me,

words of love and longing, 

of faith and loyalty.

 

I woke then and I wept then, 

that she was not in my arms,

but still I know she walks alone,

in my dreams and in my heart.

Beneath a Star in Bethlehem

While traveling in the east, I was received by some good people who insisted that even though I had just celebrated Christmas, it was actually time to celebrate the birth of our Lord a second time two weeks later. Since they were providing cookies and cake, I obliged them. I even got this poem as a gift from a mysterious figure calling himself 'Father Frost'.

 

Beneath a star in Bethlehem,
A king is born tonight
To lift the weight of all the world
A babe sleeps sound and tight.

Beneath a humble stable roof
A Virgin mourns her birth
Her son has come to bleed and die,
To bear a cross and tear the sky,
And bring heaven down to earth.

Above the stars of Bethlehem,
The angels sing for joy
Let shepherds quake and kings bow down,
The gates of hell shake at the sound,
Of this sleeping baby boy.