The Great Year: The Age of Pisces, c. 100 B.C. - 2000 A.D.

The Age of Pisces

(c. 100 B.C. - 2000 A.D.)

Fish surrounded me
when I was a child,
even my mother's arms felt
wet and cold; I could taste
salt on my lips
and lay with eyes closed
and knew the world
was an alien place.
I was surrounded by fish
all of them with
faces resembling
mother, father,
wife, mother-in-law,
they were sharks, piranha,
salmon, cod, pickerel;
they swam
upstream in my veins
finding a pool of warm
liquid in my heart
where they flung themselves
violently--
what heartache they caused!
At night I prayed
to God, as though this life
would never end,
my prayers were
the sound of water running
in a river until
giant boulders
are worn smooth. Soon
I, too, went to sea
and became a fisherman;
in my small cabin
cluttered with books,
a copy of the Vinland
Map spread across
my desk, and over my bed
was an icon of Christ
in whose arms
I rested; His eyes
followed me
as I moved from one
corner of my cabin
to the next, sometimes
His lips moved
shaping something
resembling a smile,
and I could hear Him
speak, in ancient Aramaic,
words I could not
understand;
I threw sardines
to a school
of dolphins
that swam beside
my ship, then
caressed their sides,
their eyes filled
with compassion.
The sea
is a cathedral
whose ceiling
is the stars
and whose floor
the blue water--
sun or moon reflected
it is a mosaic
of silver tiles,
the kind seen
in Roman palaces,
dolphins frozen
in the ceramic waves.

The Great Year: Age of Virgo, c. 13,000 - 10,800 B.C.

September 2016

The Age of Virgo

(c. 13,000 - 10,800 B.C.)

The months begin
and are like winter,
always longer than expected:
five months of winter, so you
long for it to end;
consider it
a time of rest and quiescence,
a time to turn inward:
add drawings to earth walls
white as fields--
grass brown in the cold,
and then disappearing beneath
more snow;
fields that are
austere,
the soul's condition
in winter.
The moon
cold and white
as earth,
it is also woman
round and open
unfolding secrets
of existence, repetition
of birth and death,
seasons, tides,
sunlight and moonlight,
planting crops,
bears hibernating
in caves, snakes
in a crevice,
deer's antlers
on the forests' floor:
this is the time
of silence, of
the soul's gestation--
at night
we see stars
moving in the sky.