Two marble columns
hold up the high temple roof —
Lovers holding hands

A jet black shellac record spins
seventy-eight times a minute.
Its label bears a lady ’round the pin:
She strums her lyre pictured on it.

It’s a flat earth of forgotten tunes
that spins on an axis of steel
through heavens lit by a lyrical moon
filled with the stars of bygone years.

The label’s lady of the lyre
smiles up from her grooved time machine,
her strums reverse the stars’ funeral pyres:
On each rotation her lyre gleams.

Beyond the grave, voices I hear
defy the dark passage of time:
They sing, resurrected from yesteryear.
Her lyre scores each lyrical line.

Each scratchy hiss and tiny pop
I hear from the disc’s dust and scars
reminds me of a radio telescope
that points up to distant quasars.

Alas, the needle drifts further on
‘til it reaches the groove’s final string
and then the tonearm waits for a new dawn
when this time machine once more sings.

An oracle stands
alone in her stone grotto —
Solitary lamp

Will she, won’t she
buy my Christmas wares:
If I work to sell me
will she take my snare?

The practiced pitter-patter
of my seller’s pitch
hangs in crisp cold air
and hopes to scratch her itch.

Her eyes dart to and fro
from one stall to the next:
the jingling coins’ fickle flow,
Christmas bells that leave me vexed.

Will she, won’t she,
see this heart that beats?
What if I add it free
to the sale of these sweetmeats?

Each moment wisps of tinsel
a-flutter in icy gales:
I fear her dismissal
as I grasp at just one more sale.

A spark of insight melts the ice
in a tiny warming breeze:
It’s not my wares I price,
but what I’m truly selling’s me.

Dear reader, let me with you share
how we must loosen winter’s snare.

I remember my last summer
when lazy clouds would puff the sky
and the river’d laugh and murmur
while the wind wandered gently by.

The trees all waved in greeting
with their maple green hand leaves
while air with nectar dripping
wafted past my senses’ eaves.

All around were people glowing,
each filled to the rim with gold sunlight,
each face a brimming chalice flowing
with the fruit of grapes of delight.

But now the sun’s departed
behind the bleak clouds’ winter coat
while leafless trees look guarded —
no more waving, just remote.

I turn my collar stiffly upwards,
wrap my scarf around my face,
become one more of masked hundreds —
of our hearts’ warming hearths no trace.

Where voices once were warm and clear,
they languish, muffled in a space
that tightens in a chilling fear
locked in the creeping frost’s embrace.

The slice of ice into my bones
snaps me awake to think again
and free myself from aches and groans
that winter’s biting shadow sends.

Under winter’s bitter blanket grey,
my mind wills back to summer’s upland hills
that shimmer in sunlit summer days
to cast off winter’s hoary chills.

And so, my friend, do we choose the dark
or do we light the solstice spark?

In a nook of an old stone church
a cherub basks in the vesper light —
A childlike innocence for which I’ve searched
that seems to slip into the onset of night.
Fade not away, you sweet dear boy
and never lose your childlike joy —
Fight, fight
the snares of twilight

The mason works the living stone
to shape it for its slotted place.
Pale flakes of rock fly as he hones
it to a rough-hewn sandstone face.

With chisel and mallet in granite hands
and flinty grey eyes to plumb the line,
the rock gives way in grains of sand.
He chips and flicks one blow at a time.

His fingers trace each pit and dell
that he’d worked in with his iron tools,
while nostrils fill with chalky smell —
light dust clouds through his workshop move.

As one by one his blocks are laid
by his apprentice at his side
to fill the role for which they’re made:
they’ll be joined in one more arch of pride.

More arches form as months move past
then building up to many a year:
They mark the time of a life well cast,
his mason’s mark left on each stone sheer.

Each arch arises, pointing high
to the master mason of us all,
who carves and fits in his workshop sky —
by shaping, marking us in his wall.

Then piece by piece, the church takes shape
while grains of sand from worked stones fall;
The mason, now old, his final finial makes
as falling sand an hourglass recalls.

And here I stand in centuries hence
to spot the mason’s mark he left behind,
his arches pointing upwards whence
the mason built his final shrine.