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26
Dec
2018
This poem grew out of seeing the sliver of a new moon, suspended in the night sky shortly after sunset. Net time you see such a moon, try reciting this poem out loud to it.
Hail to thee, silver crescent in the sky.
Tell me what you think you are.
Are you the universal sickle --
whetstoned symbol of seasonal harvest,
a harbinger of hope
that reaps the plainest grains,
to feed the famined millions?
Or are you the scimitar of Saladin,
white-hot steel tempered in the algebra of zero....
Categories: Poetry
Tags: moon, crescent, Saladin, Damocles, sickle, scimitar
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown…”
King George VI used those words in his Christmas address to the British Empire, in 1939--three months after World War II had begun. They seemed prophetic, given the “unknown” massing across the English Channel.
It seems appropriate again, as we head into a new year in which the unpredictable Donald Trump is likely to be even more explosively unpredictable, a new year in which China and Russia flex their muscles, in which financial markets display suicidal impulses, and in which global warming draws closer to irreversibility.
The night looks dark.
“Give me a light, that I may tread safely into the unknown…”
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Haskins, King George VI, "gate of the year"