'Those who have gathered these four hundred years have watched those same sunbeams waken, glide and fall away.' Photo: David Jackson on Unsplash
A golden light
Poem submitted to Airton Meeting’s ‘Year in poems’ for 2020.
The following was submitted to Airton Meeting’s ‘Year in poems’ for 2020. All Friends, visitors and Malhamdale residents were invited to send original work to be shown on the Meeting website, one per month for the year.
Sometimes a golden light falls
across the door to a place made sacred
by silence.
Stroke by stroke the beams pass over
that room where thought is stilled and then
perturbed,
the glow illuminating faces and hands,
ordinary clothes and shoes, all things
outward,
while inward light reveals, what?
The centre of each one who waits
its telling.
Those who have gathered
these four hundred years
know how shared stillness
lays bare pretension;
and though its light makes the inward plain,
it answers certainty with questions,
leaving them
better known to themselves, whilst seeking
truth only of the world of experience,
not spirits.
Those who have gathered
these four hundred years
have watched those same sunbeams
waken, glide and fall away
as their world slid from day to night
and night to day. Just as then
so we do now.
All poems submitted to the project can be read at https://airtonbarn.org.uk/a-year-in-poems.
