A Berlin building. Sunbeams of steel
made to shine in suns of future’s gold,
now dreary, dimmed and forced to kneel
to the timeless gods of growing old.

Its shining future could not last.
Sinking in a golden fade, a forgotten grail.
Of sunbeam ore, new futures are cast,
bright dreams unbound by fear’s black veil.

From the forge of steely sunbeams
comes a new grail of sunlit dreams
and the tireless gods’ tired reign
is overthrown for another day.

A cobblestone road
in a dark night dyed with woad.
Faint glitter under pale street lights.

Icy blue fog in the late night
turned electric by the passing lights
of rumbling cars that rush on by.

They leave their streaks of LED beams
that quickly fade as if a lost dream.
The night watches with a hint of a sigh.

A-walking on a wormwood path
that’s paved by age’s cobblestones
on past a palace of distant past
in a Prussian park, a mind unthroned.

He walked, a shadow
through the foggy night,
his pulse beat faint and shallow
as the pale and fitful light.

In the lace of this quicksilver mist,
a fellow shade now walked along.
She emerged from dark, adrift
like him. They hummed the same black song.

In what had been a pitiless pit
of icy fog and stony walks,
she was there as if summoned by fate’s writ.
In whispers, she and he began to talk.

They shared their bleak
and tattered tales
to raise the wreck
of where they’d failed.

And as they talked
their once distant light
began to shine
out in that night.

Here in their pale of desolation,
two kindred shades touch shadowed hands
and in their touch found consolation
to rekindle light in benighted lands.

The bright death of a star
lights the black night from afar.

Astrologers walk from east to west
and follow the nova’s fiery arc.
The burst of white in heavens’ dark chest
gives sign of a birth, love’s new spark.

They walk on through sandy shards of this earth,
past broken glass of our days
to find the one whose heralded birth
gives hope that our world is reglazed.

Held in their hands are gifts replete
that tell what the child will become:
Gold for a king, sweet incense for a priest,
for a healer, myrrh that will scent his tomb.

And the lodestar that died
signals the birth of a child
whose death and rebirth
lit a new star on this earth.

Selah.

Each year I watch them travel in a snow globe
that hangs upon my Yuletide fir tree,
a glowing glass sphere where waters flow
’round these Magi walking magically free.

Week by week, winter
clouds shroud the sun, sullen sky —
Church arch, bridge to light

Sitting in the subway.
All fix their eyes on screens —
What does this sight convey?
Is this all that their lives mean?

I’ll take a stroll
through wintry night air
to free my mind
from its dark wisps and snares.

While walking in the night’s leaden fog
that weighs upon both eyes and mind,
a building emerges from dampening slog
adorned with columns of marble refined.

The fog oppresses all the known world,
with eyes and ears slammed shut by fear.
Its thralls have spread, its pall unfurled
to wring out all sense of what was clear.

And yet: Here rises
from black fog’s embrace
the lights of a campus
that spite fog’s dimming wastes.

Upon building’s brow, above the main gate,
two words inscribed. Letters gleam through gloom
and icy tendrils of iron mist’s weight:
“Auditorium Maximum” —

— the place of the greatest hearing.
If only this hall could vastly hold
the sum of all in fog a-fearing,
to teach each to hear and be thus consoled.

To live in more than piecemeal peace
in a heartily hearth-warmed hall
where all must learn the art of hearing,
to share in the greatest art of all.