I do not often try my
hand at poetry, perhaps once in a blue moon. OK, OK, perhaps once in several
blue moons. (Permit me to digress. Do you know what a blue moon actually is? Some call the monthly new moon a blue moon; though it may seem ‘blue’ as the night sky to
us at that time, new moon is simply the time our natural satellite lies roughly
between the earth and sun in its twenty-nine day earth orbit, and from our
vantage point does not reflect sunlight. But a blue moon? Other common thought is
that a blue moon is the second full moon in the same calendar month, an errant
definition given by a popular science magazine in the mid-20th
Century. But it gets much more interesting than that: the historic definition
of blue moon is actually the third moon
in a single season that contained four full moons. At a time when people
counted agricultural and animal migration seasons by lunar cycles, it stands to
reason that a moon cycle of twenty-nine days did not neatly fit into the actual
365-day, twelve-month calendar year; keeping an annual calendar by twelve lunar
cycles would throw seasonal anticipations significantly off in a very short
time. Simple people had to make allowances for this. The annual clock could
more easily be reset by solar time; but occasionally there had to be a
‘betrayer’ moon in a season that needed to be disregarded in order to get
critical timing correct upon which life provision would depend. An early word
for betrayer was ‘belewe.’ Whichever of these last two definitions we use, with
a moon’s twenty-nine day cycle compared to thirty and thirty-one day calendar
months, ‘belewe moons’ happen on average once every 2¾ years.)
So, as I was saying
before my short attention span took control, writing poetry is not my forte (and maybe that's why poetry is not my forte...). But
I once read in an old spiritual classic the line -- I the brook, thou the spring -- and determined at some point to
give greater thought to that idea. Was it a Rainer Maria Rilke line? I cannot
recall. But here is what resulted, not all nature images to be sure, but enough
to be appropriate to my nature blog.
I the brook, Thou the
Spring
|
I the journey, Thou the
Path
|
I the known, Thou the
Mystery
|
I the warmed, Thou the
Fire
|
I the spoken, Thou the
Word
|
I the seen, Thou the Seer
|
I the leaf, Thou the Root
|
I the breath, Thou the
Life
|
I the sound, Thou the
Source
|
I the beam, Thou the
Light
|
I the borne, Thou the
Bearer
|
I the grateful, Thou the
praised
|
I the sail, Thou the Wind
|
I the vessel, Thou the
Filling
|
I the thought, Thou the
Mind
|
I the clay, Thou the Hand
|
I the wing, Thou the Lift
|
I the moment, Thou the
Ever
|
I the lantern, Thou the
Oil
|
I the deed, Thou the Will
|
I the image, Thou the
Artist
|
I the breaker, Thou the
Tide
|
I the held, Thou the
Holder
|
I the mite, Thou the Expanse
|
I the fruit, Thou the
Vine
|
I the cherished, Thou the
Love
|
I the act, Thou the Force
|
I the gleam, Thou the Gem
|
I the protected, Thou the
Shelter
|
I the eye, Thou the
Vision
|
I the sustained, Thou the
Food
|
I the chased, Thou the
Pursuer
|
I the object, Thou the
Subject
|
I the void, Thou the
Fullness
|
I the faint, Thou the
Strength
|
I the question, Thou the
Answer
|
|
~RGM, from an earlier entry
in my nature journal
This filled me with joy...and caused a tear or two.
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear you enjoyed it, Brian. I also find joy in thinking through and writing the posts.
ReplyDeleteWe miss you up here!
Rick