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.
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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© December 2015
