Today I realized that my new year is the full moon after the vernal equinox. Passover, Easter, and take a look at April in Wikipedia for the countries and religions, mostly Asian and East Asian, celebrating their New Year this month.
The winter brings increasing exhaustion, weaker and weaker it continues, until today. On Easter Sunday morning it's like I'm buried, decomposing with the termites; I can smell the dank earth of transformation. My inner being shifts today.
By mid-day, the strengthening begins. Energy awakens, renewal has begun. My new year begins.
My spirits rise, I am enlivened.
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This poem, in 2006, and it's still the same, every year.
Eostre, Or Cross of Sheer Light
I found myself ebbing
away, and so I fasted.
When my commitment to
life renewed itself, I broke
my fast.
If you've ever been dead and come back to life,
been hopeless and found a way to continue,
thrown yourself into nothingness to find meaning.
An elusive tune,
slender wash of light,
bare opening in the wall,
a sliver, crescent through which.
Or what's a moment but a casting through.
If you've been too tired to get up and then you get up.
Filled with silent despair and then the will to.
Nothing's even, that's the problem. Many impermanent states.
All taking turns or colliding. Interpenetrating or scattering.
Flowing or stuck. Constraining or freeing.
I like to have clean thoughts because then I can live in my mind.
Sometimes the dust, anger, grime.
Throw what's scathing out.
I feel your bright and beautiful presence
even if you feel like you've disappeared into nothing.
The edges of the sky hang like an aurora borealis of silk.
The trompe l'oeil of the moment. Discreet packets of time.
If you didn't tell me I was going to die, I wouldn't believe it.
And then the scaffolding crashed, blocks fell apart,
what resisted melted, and it was time to resurrect.
Passing beyond memory into. Or the rising.
©Brenda Clews
Good Friday, 2006
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photographic path: a photo I took of sheer fabric over light, cropped, layered on itself, rotated, made somewhat transparent; then I may have used a marque tool to crop the uppermost layer to better reveal the brocade ribbon below, or was that one of the trajectories I didn't use; various marque tools to crop the right & left edges of the uppermost layer on right angles; the stamp tool to fill in a line that was left over from who knows what process; the burn tool to darken the upper and bottom right corners for visual balance. A collage I composed after writing the poem...
This is a photopoem: I've digitally embedded the poem in the image along with copyright information.
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