(reposted in memory of the families and victims of Manchester Arena)
Rising to the brightening fields
to the bridge of day and night
when all is in balance
briefly.
Friends, families, dog-walkers, gather
by the quickening stream
united by their mutual awe.
This morning a kingdom
holds its breath,
the day of the new moon,
the day of the Spring Equinox,
the day of the solar eclipse,
the sun entering Aries,
all the usual astrological mumbo-jumbo.
But the solar system is not our personal orrery.
The show is not for us,
although we act like it is.
Not full totality here,
but dramatic enough
for us to stand and stare
astonished,
as the moon takes a bite out of the sun,
Fenris’ rabid bite-marks
raising hackles of primal fear
beyond science and common sense.
Birds quieten, a wind stirs,
pets are bewildered.
Yet we know the light will win in the end.
The moon for once
turns its face away
from the radiance.
A loyal mirror
today is shattered.
Some will turn away from goodness,
some will turn away from the light,
some choose evil’s imagined glamour,
some choose the night.
And yet, in the great scheme of things
(has anyone had a look lately?)
both are needed.
Not a fifty-fifty fixed rigidity
but a flowing, a to-ing and fro-ing.
Like rough-and-tumble cubs fighting.
Towards summer, the lion of sunlight dominates.
Towards winter, a beast cast in night’s bronze.
Both have their place in the Great Dance.
Yet often the light feels frail.
Ah,
so much darkness in the world.
Black-clad barbarians enacting their
impotent rage on aid-workers,
school-children, museum-visitors.
Infantile despots, wanting the world
to comply to their solipsistic
Cyclopean monomania,
their pinhead paradigm,
which perverts its own doctrines
to serve whatever devil lurks inside.
See them nurse their grievance narratives,
polish their Russian rifles,
strap on their home-made bombs,
thinking their lonely library of a single book
can justify destroying all others.
Yet this morning all of that is erased
by the sublime benediction of the new sun,
still shining its endless love on all of its children.
This morning the Earth is like a prayer –
grass, flower, tree: hands raised in praise.
All that lives, that is truly alive,
turns towards the light.
Only that which denies, which deals in
death, in the destruction of its own past,
a Year Zero moronism, does otherwise.
Yet this morning I stand
one foot in the shade
one foot in the light,
between the Horns and the Heavens
a balancing act, a tight-rope walk,
across the Niagaras of positive and negative
moving stubbornly beyond duality.
Beyond a binary world of
with-us or against-us.
I stand poised on Equinox Bridge
knowing as I cross it
that it disappears behind me as I pass,
that it never truly existed
a fleeting moment, a pulse of awareness,
cherry blossom falling on snow.
And somewhere the future
is surging towards us like the swell of the bore.
And somewhere a king
with a black name is buried,
and somewhere Persiled druids
stand posing in the sun.
All bathed in
eight minute-old light
which scatters its photons
magnanimously across the tilting Earth,
the part we call north,
the place we call home.
In the blink of a blind god’s eye.
Kevan Manwaring
Spring Equinox, 2015
(reposted in memory of the families and victims of Manchester Arena)
