On watching Marion and Renee dancing for Our Lady and on hearing Cheryl sing

Such perfect symmetry of the hearts' alliance

Fluid and freeing

And full of joy



The body is moving with the life of the Spirit

Blithely revealing the passions of the soul

Here on the running grass

In the open air

Somewhere

Between kenosis and fulfilment

Somewhere

Between loss and enlargement of the heart’s gift

Somewhere

Between daily dullness in the earth’s shadow

And the bliss of offering in heaven’s light


The dancers speak for us with their fragile limbs


Leap into ecstasy

Reach into kindness

Fall into sadness


Tenderly reminding us

That we in our strange wanderings

Are beautiful to Someone

Somewhere.






Sarah de Nordwall, 8th September 2012, the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin 2012

On Hearing of an Artist at the Celtic Festival of Acadia

The artist cut one Maple Tree

And made of it nine instruments


He will bring them once

Together again

For a single night to play.


And who would not wait with sacred longing

For the playing of the nine

From the broken tree?


Who would not hope from such a moment

A taste of the soul’s wild ecstasy?


The Maple Tree sings in many voices

A song cut from a single heart


And peace

And balance

And practicality

All are surpassed in this final

Art.


Sweetness of utter intoxication.

Given

And open, surrendered and free.


The Maple divided is now resurrected.


The song of the nine

Is the Song of the Three.





Sarah de Nordwall September 6th 2012

The Coastal Robot

or On looking out of the East Coast train from London to Edinburgh


Incredible how the sea dispels alarm

Arousing joy without a cause



Immediate!


A sight of inevitable bliss so inarticulate

and yet replete with messages and thrones.


Then suddenly a monstrous thing

a squat and hideous robot,

square and brute

Sits on the coast line like an ugly toy left out by troll children

Blind to the ravishing waves.


A factory made of concrete blocks.

A nuclear power station?

What exactly is it?

Could one possibly say
Without initiation into madness of the bluntest kind?

And there and here beside the railway tracks

Vast cylinders and wagons,

making grey a frightful thing


Whilst the veiling mist attempts a kind reminder of the truthful nature of this
Heavenly shade... so close to silver and to dawn.


But peace;
the breath returns and someone with a gentle eye has now laid out the land.

A green field
of a generous startling hue


gives us a barn
with a long bright roof of red.


a white house by a fallow field
and a crimson post van in a country lane,


Its speed commensurate with human dignity
And a sense of pace of life.


Oh Lord protect us from the paceless things

That sit enthroned in deathless tedium.

Rip out the horrors that can never breathe

And fill again our earth with life that dies

And naturally expires in rapturous gratitude.


How wonderful that things ephemeral

Lift up our fragile hopes into eternity.

Whilst stolid robots, stiff with glass eyed potency

Will, changeless, fall entire into the night.