“Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree“
Burnt Norton ~ T.S. Eliot.
The ninth hour settled with the holy ghost
one winter flame partitioning the gloom
contented doves on folded wings were host
with quietude, immured in catacomb.
Orisons murmured to a gentler Lord
have garnered sounds enough to fill a spire
yet stillness is the way oft unexplored
disquieting to us who shall expire
from basest mud to sacred blue sapphire
From basest mud to sacred blue sapphire
an interchange too wondrous for belief
our dead inert in earth or ash and fire
and such finality compounds each grief.
All truths are censored by credulity
this here, this now, is keeping minds engrossed
there is no leap of faith, just certainty
- yet still we find when turning innermost
the ninth hour cometh with the holy ghost
Note: the ninth hour from Roman times (nona hora) was a traditional Jewish time for prayer adopted into the Christian liturgy, being nine hours after sunrise or 3 pm. For those who meditate, it is also deemed an ideal time, when energies are more relaxed.
My Meeting the Bar prompt Something Novel in Lines is a poetry form called The Novelinee. Invented by Sarah Rayburn and written in iambic pentameter or 10 syllable lines (decasyllabic) with alternate stresses. It has nine line stanza(s), with a rhyme sequence: a,b,a,b,c,d,c,d,d. The Closed Novelinee form I have written here comprises 2 stanzas with mirroring in first and last lines hence that final stanza follows a different rhyme sequence of d,e,d,e,f,a,f,a,a
PoetryPix 