A truck load of animals on the way to the abattoir

Phillip's Square seen from The Bay in late May 2011

The Great Year: The Age of Taurus, c. 4550 - 2400 B.C.

The Age of Taurus

(c. 4550 - 2400 B.C.)

The bull silent
in an ochre coloured
field, genitals hanging;
the shadow
in moonlight
of one
whose body was a man's,
whose head was a bull's--
he fed on human flesh,
his image inhabits
every mirror--
our passions
are too great.
We each
have one song,
a chorus
repeating
our need for love;
oh, I am consumed
with betrayal
and darkness,
inhabiting
a labyrinth
and waiting
for my executioner
who even now
I hear trying to walk
silently around a corner
with a club and knife.

The Great Year: The Age of Gemini, c. 6480 - 4550 B.C.

Montreal, 1852

The Age of Gemini


(6480 - 4550 B.C.)

When Adam and Eve
left the Garden
the journey began,
and so we find ourselves
always searching--
our memories
held together
by darkness,
tawdry rope
grown weak, unravelling,
and unkind.
Somewhere a garden
exists, but it,
too, is a memory;
our fall
is endured
alone.
We have invented
the Wheel of Life,
erected sacred pillars,
know gods in Heaven
and gods in the Underworld.
We are centaurs,
half man half
horse, half
divine and still
we are wounded;
why can we heal
others but not
ourselves?
I fell asleep
and woke at middle age,
so many years spent
in deepening sleep
until released
as though the ground opened
beneath my feet
and nothing was ever
the same.
Betrayal and grief,
love and compassion,
now I am someone
I never was
before, one
with the soul's
wounding.

Champlain Bridge in April 2011 (two)

The Great Year: The Age of Cancer, c. 8640 - 6480 B.C.

The Age of Cancer

(c. 8640 - 6480 B.C.)

We do not live
in caves, we visit
them as holy places--
each seed planted
is a new beginning,
and this is our desire:
the moon, the first
seed, erotic and glowing
in the night sky;
who could not be in awe
seeing the full moon--
stars disappear
and our homes
cast shadows
across the path
to the edge
of a forest or
the ocean's shore--
we visit caves
as sanctuaries
returning us
to what is lost:
a cave, the moon,
a woman's womb.
Floods cleanse
the land,
the soul
that watery element.
We place water
in bowls, seeds
in woven baskets,
the dead in graves,
live in settlements,
count seeds, trade
amulets, bracelets,
necklaces, female figurines
the size of your thumb--
the grave a container
for men, women, children;
bones with patterns scratched
on them, bodies positioned
in the earth containing them.

Black Elk: Crying for a Vision

Every man can cry for a vision, or "lament"; and in the old days we all -- men and women -- "lamented" all the time. What is received through the "lamenting" is determined in part by the character of the person who does this, for it is only those people who are very qualified who receive the great visions, which are interpreted by our holy man, and which give strength and health to our nation.

The Sacred Pipe, Black Elk's account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux, recorded & edited by Joseph Epes Brown, (Baltimore, Penguin Books, 1971) p. 44.

The Great Year: The Age of Leo, c. 10,800 - 8,640 B.C.

Age of Leo

(c. 10,800 - 8640 B.C.)

A lion is born
in the heart,
he walks at night
enters dreams,
and in our throats
when we wake
we seem to hear
growls, roars.
This is not
a time for prayer
or worship
of any god,
but knowing
an inner light
illuminating
consciousness,
as the sun
moves across fields,
mountains, lakes,
from morning rising
to evening sunset.
Here is the birth
of Apollo, somewhere
else Dionysus is born,
somewhere else again
Hermes and Osiris.
This golden age
when we found
light above our
heads, within
our souls;
and always
a lion waiting
in the distance.

Champlain Bridge in April 2011

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.

The Great Year

01 01 2017

I have always been concerned, perhaps obsessed, by time. I have been a diarist since January 1965. Some of my first poems were about the transience of time. How could they have not been when I was preoccupied with death and failure? I have written an extensive history of my family, going back to the early 1800s. I have written "A Short History of the Irish in Montreal" and other poems that I group into the category of history, time, the years. Since the mid-1980s I have written poems on individual years. I look at my life and think there is more that has been done than will be done in the future. The expiry date is not far off. It is time to do the important work of life, the mission of writing and what it means, the vision of art. There is chronological time, emotional time, and cosmic time. This poem, then, deals in cosmic time.

The poems that follow, "The Great Year," were first published at The Astrology Guild website (probably now defunct) and in my selected poems, Mapping the Soul (1998):

(http://www.astrologyguild.com/thegreatyear.htm).

The Great Year

In our present day, when this same planet, Earth, rocking slowly on its axis in its course around the sun, is about to pass out of astrological range of the zodiacal sign of the Fish (Pisces) into that of the Water Bearer (Aquarius), it does indeed seem that a fundamental transformation of the historical conditions of its inhabiting humanity is in prospect.

                                            --Joseph Campbell
                                            The Inner Reaches of Outer Space (1986)

These poems celebrate the Great Year, a period of time that lasts 25,868 years during which Earth passes through the twelve zodiacal signs, and the Great Months, each lasting approximately 2,500 solar years. Poetry, like astrology and mythology, is the language of the unconscious mind, dreams, symbolism, irrationality and intuition. © Stephen Morrisey, M.A.. 2002

Age of Virgo - c. 13000 - 10800 B.C.Age of Leo - c. 10800 - 8640 B.C.Age of Cancer - c. 8640 - 6480 B.C.Age of Gemini- c. 6480 - 4550 B.C.Age of Taurus- c. 4550 - 2400 B.C.Age of Aries- c. 2400 B.C. - 100 B.C.Age of Pisces- c. 100 B.C. - 2000 A.DAge of Aquarius- c. 2000 - 4000 A.D.

Where Cedar meets Pine Avenue (two)

Where Cedar meets Pine Avenue (one)

Rowan trees outside Loyola Chapel, Concordia University, November 2010

Man on street corner with placard

A shoe store window on Monkland Avenue in Montreal

Renovations at 2226 Girouard Avenue in October 2009

My heart went out of visiting Girouard Avenue when the renovations began. Whatever there was of the place as it used to be is now gone. The future has arrived and it has little to do with the past. I hope the new residents, in their brand new condo, will enjoy living there, but my interest was solely in family history.

Jean Cocteau on Poetry

Excerpts from Opium, by Jean Cocteau, (Icon Books, London, UK, 1957). Cocteau's notes were written in December 1928 while he was a patient in a clinic near Paris for opium addiction. In the following, I have excerpted only his notes on poetry.
----------------------------------------------

     One cannot translate a real poet; not because his style is musical, but because his thought has a plastic quality, and, if this changes, the thought changes.
     A Russian said to me: ‘The style of Orphée is musical in the opposite way to what the public calls musical. In spite of its lack of music, it is musical because it leaves the spirit free to profit from it as it wishes.

*

     A poet, unless he is a politician (such as Hugo, Shelley or Byron), must only count on readers who know his language, the spirit of his language and the soul of his language.

* *

     What of a poet or a dramatist endowed with the Indian fakir’s power of mass-hypnosis? Why do you boast then about not being in the realm of illusion and of seeing the trick behind the curtain? It is a case of people making fun of genius because they cannot be touched by it. That is the whole difference between us and the camera with its coweye. Many minds are confused between being touched and being victimized, admiring and being the dupe. They brace themselves against hypnosis. It is easy, alas! because the poet uses his fluid indirectly and possesses only the feeblest means of persuasion.
     A museum is only justified to the extent that it bears witness to ancient activities, and keeps what remains of the phosphorescence around works, the fluid that emanates from them, and thanks to which they succeed in overcoming death.

* * *

     Once a poet wakes up, he is stupid, I mean intelligent. “Where am I?”, he asks, like ladies who have fainted. Notes written by a poet who is awake are not worth much. I offer them only for what they are worth, at my own risk. One more experience.

* * * *

     The inexplicable importance of poetry. Poetry considered as algebra.
     First of all, poetry only solicits the toughest minds, minds which should scorn it as a luxury; the worst of all.
     If it were proved to me that I would condemn myself to death if I did not burn “L’Ange Heurtebise,” [A poem which Cocteau first published in 1925. (Tr.)] I would perhaps burn it.
     If it were proved to me that I would condemn myself to death if I did not add to or take away one syllable from the poem, I could not change it, I would refuse, I would die.
     When I see all the artists who used to make a practise of despising the fashionable world because they had not as yet been received into it, lapse into snobbishness after the age of forty, I congratulate myself on having had the possibility of going into the fashionable world at sixteen and on having had enough of it by the time I was twenty-five.

* * * * *

     Legend gathers round poets who live in glass houses. If they hide and live in some unknown cellar, the public thinks: “You’re hiding, you want us to believe there is something where there is nothing.”
     On the other hand, if they look at the glass house, the public thinks: Your over simple gestures conceal something. You are deceiving us, you are mystifying us; and everyone begins to guess, distort, interpret, search, find, symbolise, and mystify.
     People who come close to me and fathom the mystery, pity me and become angry; they do not know the advantages of a ridiculous legend: when they throw me to the flames they burn a lay figure who is not even like me. A bad reputation should be maintained with more love and more luxury than a little dancer.
     In this way, I can explain the fine phrase that Max Jacob wrote to me: One should not be known for what one does.
     Fame in one’s lifetime should only be used for one thing: to allow our work, after our death, to start out with a name.

* * * * * *

     I wonder how people can write the lives of poets since the poets themselves could not write their own life. There are too many mysteries, too many true falsehoods, too many complications.
     What can be said of the passionate friendships which must be confused with love, and yet nevertheless are something else, of the limits of love and friendship, of this region of the heart in which unknown senses participate, which cannot be understood by those who live standard lives?
     Dates overlap, years mingle together. The snow melts, the feet fly away; no footprints remain.

Trees at Montreal West Train Station

This life we live

26 March 2011

What a strange and wonderful journey we are on. It is a narrative—a journey from birth to death—in which we are the protagonist in our own life's story. This life has to do with our integrity as people, with our love for others, with our sense of humour; with the drama of our existence, with insight into the complexity of existence. In this narrative there is character development, a protagonist, an antagonist, a foil, and psychological and spiritual depth found in symbol, archetype, imagery, setting and foreshadowing, as well as in ambiguity, irony and paradox. No wonder people love a good narrative, a good story, even a good myth; it is at the basis of existence.

Margaret Laurence writes in her novel, A Jest of God, that the more narrowly self-conscious we are the less connected we are to other people. The jest of God is just this: to be consumed with our own ego denies us an awareness of the unself-conscious beauty of life in which there is connection to other people. Rachel Cameron, the protagonist of Laurence's novel, realizes that "to be wise you must be a fool first." She learns to live with contradiction and ambiguity, and to accept the anxiety that comes with this awareness. She affirms life, she does not retreat into the past but says "yes" to new experiences and an unknown future that awaits her.

Over the years, we move relentlessly to the resolution of life's drama which is the narrative of our existence. At the end, when we die, it would be good if we could say that it's been an exciting life, a life worth living, a life in which we have fulfilled our potential and our destiny. All art is vision or it's just a repetition of the past.