Saint Lucy's Day is 13 December, previously considered the shortest day of the year. She was martyred with a knife on the orders of the Roman prefect for defending her virginity. She is often shown carrying a lamp and is the patron saint of the blind and of writers (how ironically appropriate!)
Anyone who knows the cliffs around Lamorna Cove to the west of Penzance, will have thought on the disastrous consequences of a fall onto the rocks and sea below.
For poison in the ears see Shakespeare's 'Hamlet.'
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The years pass by, though speeding up in age;
December and the shortest day are here;
The
twelve months gone have quit and claimed their wage
And
left a twilight trough that’s more a bier.
Saint
Lucy’s day is slow to light and soon
To
dark, the hours between are brown and stale;
Like
brittle leaves those hours are dead by noon
And
after that the dusk is mute as braille.
An
age-pained body and a mind in woe –
These
things I muse on, Yeats’s “life and work,”
Both
unperfected; one as cold as snow,
The
other blustered up from trick and quirk.
But
worse is thought of these past fifty years
In
which an island culture killed itself,
Smashed
its temples, poured poison in its ears,
And
flung its bones upon a dusty shelf;
It
thereby stole the context which might give
Meaning
to my failure, and orphaned me
To
stumble mud-bound, anguished how to live
In
fair fields flooded by a foreign sea.
No
polity survives without a creed
That’s
Other-based. And yet the western church
Let
slip elite and mass: the mustard seed
Become
– self-stranded on a stony perch –
A
thing of women and falsetto men.
And
now a book-fomented angry roar
That’s
bound to catechize the state again
Makes
hajj through field and town and strikes the door.
Ah,
where find succour in an age so
foul?
Might
Orthodoxy’s icons calm the brow,
Their
cool-eyed staring from a martyr’s cowl
Which
peace and stiff-backed piety endow?
Or
might Plotinus with his trance-like thought,
Tough
analyst of Truth’s economy,
Give
comfort whilst the self in matter
caught
Seeks
flight to That whose essence is to be?
Perhaps,
when standing on the split-faced cliffs
Beyond
Lamorna, thundering pagan winds
Will
throw me to the sea’s mad
hieroglyphs
Which,
frenzied, tear the flesh and life rescinds;
And
then, at one with rock and sand and sea,
My
scattered molecules all shared about,
The
helpless questions of finality
Will
hang in the wind’s laugh and the waves’ shout.
Well,
Lucy’s night has fallen. With my
books
And
sad regrets I crouch upon a flame
And
warm my fingers, their arthritic crooks,
Palsied
in mind with self-deriding shame.
My
window flares a moment with a lamp
As
someone treks the dark like Will-o’-wisp,
Though
pray it’s Lucy in the frost and damp,
Her
footsteps lisping on the grasses crisp.
Her
death-crowned ardency before the knife,
Prefect-defying
with a maiden’s might,
Gives
balm to one whose each-way-driven life
Sags
like a shroud this deep December night.
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