Amethysts and Emeralds

48. St Teresa of Ávila

The seven-roomed clear castle
My vision’s castle of the soul
Appears to be of diamond
But I suspect its crystal
Is really frozen Holy Water.
And I have spent hours contemplating water
Water as cold as convent stones beneath my discalced feet
Spent brief hours thinking of bright water flowing
Like two long lines of words
From the Two Fountains –
Especially the continuously bubbling one-source fountain:
God.
The water of that fountain never scatters into droplets
That freeze and spiral into hell
Like dying snowflakes –
Snowflakes that in my other vision
Are souls torn apart by rainbows
Of seven dark colours.
I pray my mother Beatriz never bowed her head
Beneath such rainbows
I pray the Counter-Reformation
Can assuage all souls
And I hope with all my words that I am not contradicting myself
For they are the expression of my thoughts
From the Beloved.
May others shape them like my perfect seven-roomed castle –

And though its walls are now foreshortened quartz
They still leave clear foundations in my mind;
The efflorescing crystal still exhorts
My soul and souls alive today to find
If it is like those others have defined.
And likest is vnto that heavenly towre
That God hath built for his own blessed bowre.

46. Sonnet for Ordinary Time

The sacred year’s two great timespans are green,
With chasubles resplendent emeralds
That Ordinary Time has assembled;
Formal stipe of a crux gemmata seen
From Pentecost to Advent, the fourteen
Minus eight long months from May so herald
Euclidean geometry, levelled
Against Einstein as one long beam. Between
The Baptism and Lenten points are stones
Of equal weight: gneiss gems of Living Water
Like cleaved green pomegranate seeds, but grown
Isometrically within an altar
Of quartz – uvarovite, the whole then sown
Outside time to the honour of the Author.

50. Petrarchan Sonnet of Light

A mirror with a rainbow-coloured tain
Will fuse these signs to rhyme A B B A
And then, attaining Light, their maker’s day,
Transform them as if through a stained-glass pane
Whereby we cry: Abba (Father) again
So that a farther sun can raise the ray
Towards the water that so loves the Way
It lenses ice out of the sacred rain.
This frozen Holy Water will form prisms,
Guiding each silver spirit as if dew
That haloes the refracting rays like chrism
Glistening on the temples of the few
Who shun the ontological schism
And pass through glass and diamonds renewed.

9. In the Wake of Poseidon

The ocean covers the entire world now:
A tiny island
Is all that’s left of our relationship,
Where once there was a planet-wide landmass.
Together we explored its lava plains,
As free as the horizon,
Our bare backs warm in the sunset’s breath –
Before, insanely, the equator of our middle age
Tightened around us and the things we held dear,
Binding us so we were immobile in the rising brine
While a vicious trident speared your heart
And stabbed my abdomen;
The middle prong impacting just the air
Which, looking back, was all we ever really had.
And now we barely gasp
As we struggle to enunciate pleasantries
Before spume curls into our mouths and nostrils
And great waves threaten to engulf even us.

44. Villanelle of the Present Age

Praise Kyrios, eternal tutelar;
Across the twilight bay inscribe all texts.
Erase glyphed Sirius, reverse-god star.

See Christ, as if a lighthouse visioned far
From Syria, rewrite its darkened codex.
Praise Kyrios, eternal tutelar.

In Kypros, différance’s abattoir
Reddened economics, rendered light complex.
Erase glyphed Sirius, reverse-god star.

So Greece’s Syriza must be debarred
From casting at the west pearls of perspex.
Praise Kyrios, eternal tutelar.

The Five Star Movement, Italy’s discard
And dross, awaits the serious reflex.
Erase glyphed Sirius, reverse-god star.

To souls, Lord Christ, you are the Achernar
This world requires as passage to the next.
Praise Kyrios, eternal tutelar.
Erase glyphed Sirius, reverse-god star.

16. Sonnet for the Watchers

The third most ancient people of the stars
Believing in the soul but not in God
Extended disbelief to a bizarre
Rejection of itself, with just a nod
To space as they retreated to their far

Radburn parklands beneath primeval suns –
Steinmetz lifelessness viewed through lucite tears,
Declining as in 3 to 2 to 1
Other-world cutting. Iridescent years

Of eating their horned beasts roasted or live,
Of lopping limbs even if they regrow
Somnambulate with stratocratic drive –

The galaxies now asterisks, footnotes,
The stratosphere’s long lockstep learned by rote.