sw00303a-holy.saturday

Autobio


 OT = Old Testament                 NT = New Testament

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 Today is Holy Saturday, or Absent Day, or Tomb Day,
 or Mourning Day, which together oddly, yet perhaps
 appropriately, acronym to ATM, which in turn makes 
 me think: atonement.  An old poem of mine--I do not
 recall when I first penned it--reveals an OT/NT God I
 speak of as "Rune".  Its style is neo-Romantic.  Given
 the temper of these times on planet Earth, I feel today
 is a good day for it to reappear.  I was a church-going
 Roman Catholic then, but now, as I say in my recently
 revised "January: Year-day 2" sonnet :
          I am a roamin' Cath'lic.
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 Depending upon circumstances, this status may change.
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 "Words from the Rune"


 I have it yet upon the stinking marigold,
     The glory of an angered eye;
 And where the flesh-path brushes past a naked thorn,
     The straightened will of Zion cold;
 And in my spear-infested waters
   Which tear at trunks of towered sky,
     The power of a thousand slaughters,
     The pleasure of eternal scorn.

 I send this still among man's dying villages,
     The chalice filled with living Blood;
 And through his fields of darkened wheat,
     The Bread that harries pillages;
 And under concrete mountains formed with rods
   Where shadows stab each other in the flood,
     The words which massacre his brazen gods;
     The collared-man to wash his feet.

 I take them yet out from the human slime,
     Those worthy figs I had no need to curse;
 And, oh, those star-surpassing objects devils burn,
     Holied tools to cross the spread of time;
 And all above their dry and chaffy earth
   Which are the hopes both good and bad disperse,
     I crush on streets the thistle's mirth;
     I build a chapel for the fern.

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     [ "Words from the Rune" first appeared in
       First Pick, a rare out-of-print book,
       Copyright 1982 by Alden St. Cloud
       Thinking Lizard     Austin, Texas 78741 ]

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Brian A. J. Salchert