The impressive phenomenon was seen on Saturday 25 November 2023 at about 6.30 pm. I thought I was the only one but when I came to write the poem, a bit of web research showed it had been widely seen all over the UK with many images recorded on social media.
The final line of the poem is a truncated version of the first line of Psalm 18 (Douay-Rheims version) - "The heavens show forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of His hands." It is a wonderful psalm - read it.
Another of my syllabic poems which argues its way to a conclusion is "Thoughts Whilst Watching," written in October/November 2018 and posted here on 1 July 2022.
---------------
In Advent-tide, one frozen
Still-aired evening, thinking to freshen
My mind, made slug-a-bed by
The house’s baunic heating,
Stepping from my kitchen door to breathe
Taut lungfuls of the icy
Winter’s darkness (my backyard
Pin-glittering with crusty ice-dew
Patched on wall and slipskate path),
My eye, astonished, staring
With a toddler’s fixed and doubtful gaze,
Was lifted skywards by what,
In the hominid ages,
Would doubtless have cravened skins-clad men
To their knees, foreheads trembling
Against the freezing plateau,
Fearful that some dire god stood threshold
To indulge its tripwire self:
Well, in a cloud-lacking sky,
Windlessly silent bar the grizzle
Of surf slumping fretfully
On the beach’s distant banks,
And pin-cushioned here-there by stars’ glints,
By chance’s pure fluke I saw
A prodigy which, with gasps,
Might force even modern self-praising
Man to his grovelling hams:
A mighty miles-wide halo,
Whitely glowing, lasooed a full-faced
Moon all yellow-gold, filling
Fully a quarter heaven
With its misty aureole, corralled
At edge by a flamed border,
As if the moon’s Brünnhilde,
Catafalqued, lay captived but cherished
In Wotan’s protective fire:
And more: adjunct at the moon’s
Bier, Jupiter, tungsten-bright, outshone
All heaven’s creatures, intense
As a welder’s flare, pupiled
With the moon in that halo’s iris:
Astounding sight! And both loomed
Large by orbit’s whim, so close
To earth, seeming to threaten unsure
Horrors if gods’ gloire was bruised
By man’s unthinking shruggings,
(No surprise then if, pre-history,
Men hotfooted to fend off
Trouble with wailings and gobs
Of fatted flesh offered on rock tops
For the High Ones’ nose-wrinkled
Assuaging). Let be: far from
Bodying what’s brutal, inconstant,
That drama, rightly perceived,
Instantiates orderedness,
(Proportion, symmetry), making known
Meaning, the Cosmos aware
Of itself (through the see-er)
As fit relation of all to all.
Thus, that which would have chivvied
First-men as gods’ ill augur
Is but moon’s refracted light striking
Through high-misted ice crystals
And yielding epiphanies
Which become man’s task to analyse.
But this “knownness,” bone-felt as
Beauty (making tangible
“Rightness in being” that’s an ur-sense),
Lacks its own self-existence,
Therefore’s confirmed by the Ens
That is – named beyond all names as God,
The One: hence, farewell ye gods
Become shadows: the wide skies
And all their appearances – halos,
Black holes, novae – chant solely
Of God’s glory, the work of His hands.
(Phenomenon seen Saturday 25 November 2023 about 6.30pm.)
---------------
In Advent-tide, one frozen
Still-aired evening, thinking to freshen
My mind, made slug-a-bed by
The house’s baunic heating,
Stepping from my kitchen door to breathe
Taut lungfuls of the icy
Winter’s darkness (my backyard
Pin-glittering with crusty ice-dew
Patched on wall and slipskate path),
My eye, astonished, staring
With a toddler’s fixed and doubtful gaze,
Was lifted skywards by what,
In the hominid ages,
Would doubtless have cravened skins-clad men
To their knees, foreheads trembling
Against the freezing plateau,
Fearful that some dire god stood threshold
To indulge its tripwire self:
Well, in a cloud-lacking sky,
Windlessly silent bar the grizzle
Of surf slumping fretfully
On the beach’s distant banks,
And pin-cushioned here-there by stars’ glints,
By chance’s pure fluke I saw
A prodigy which, with gasps,
Might force even modern self-praising
Man to his grovelling hams:
A mighty miles-wide halo,
Whitely glowing, lasooed a full-faced
Moon all yellow-gold, filling
Fully a quarter heaven
With its misty aureole, corralled
At edge by a flamed border,
As if the moon’s Brünnhilde,
Catafalqued, lay captived but cherished
In Wotan’s protective fire:
And more: adjunct at the moon’s
Bier, Jupiter, tungsten-bright, outshone
All heaven’s creatures, intense
As a welder’s flare, pupiled
With the moon in that halo’s iris:
Astounding sight! And both loomed
Large by orbit’s whim, so close
To earth, seeming to threaten unsure
Horrors if gods’ gloire was bruised
By man’s unthinking shruggings,
(No surprise then if, pre-history,
Men hotfooted to fend off
Trouble with wailings and gobs
Of fatted flesh offered on rock tops
For the High Ones’ nose-wrinkled
Assuaging). Let be: far from
Bodying what’s brutal, inconstant,
That drama, rightly perceived,
Instantiates orderedness,
(Proportion, symmetry), making known
Meaning, the Cosmos aware
Of itself (through the see-er)
As fit relation of all to all.
Thus, that which would have chivvied
First-men as gods’ ill augur
Is but moon’s refracted light striking
Through high-misted ice crystals
And yielding epiphanies
Which become man’s task to analyse.
But this “knownness,” bone-felt as
Beauty (making tangible
“Rightness in being” that’s an ur-sense),
Lacks its own self-existence,
Therefore’s confirmed by the Ens
That is – named beyond all names as God,
The One: hence, farewell ye gods
Become shadows: the wide skies
And all their appearances – halos,
Black holes, novae – chant solely
Of God’s glory, the work of His hands.
(Phenomenon seen Saturday 25 November 2023 about 6.30pm.)
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© February 2024
