How

How turn the world from its sad seasons to a hopeful message worthy of hope.
The human family as evidenced by our persistence here, does carry on.
We live on the myths of fragments others have left, be it songs, artifacts, language
Or a mythology to match (commensurate with the suffering fired in the crucible of oppression).

A voice, the uplift – how is it we seek the darkest hours from which to make heroes?
Solemn baking of the loaf, the chain of iron, the how to of bread making, farming and
Famine.

Rusticated, a trace left in the language of how people not only cope,
But conceive the nature of the world.
And as in that practice of prayerful consideration or marking the turning year collectively
We can track millennia and have the years give forth from the chest and bosom of the past,
A bit of the open door, the invitation that the present makes of the future.

It’s a strange bow and steely scream that rends the fabric, cuts the thing of the sky open
As lightning, dawn, revelation tarnished as much as the story of how our ancestors
Got by and that we must celebrate as an antidote to woe,
Catch in phrase for our own meagre input for generations and eons hence when we know not
If people will share the turning world or if its great bulk is but the book end,
Or sill of another window on the ocean of story spilling from the edge.

The flat earth made everyone groan.
The perfect circle of the moon, no wonder the jig is danced in circles,
The young girl with a spark in her eye,
The tier and try, dainty but left,
The whole of weeping swarms,
The arm of muscled knuckle, brandished metal.
Gee whiz I am small, my output insignificant.
The experience of us together shaves the rough edges from language and feelings
Not too far from what we might want to believe is the just achievement of
Humanity’s endless seeming strife through the chaos of animal life that has honed
Our ideas and bodies to reflect the logic not just of this strange hard planet,
But of the rotating heaven, the distant billion load of our ancestry in space and time
Turning as the music, the sorrow, the revelation that even the Universe
Is but one among many, so many that our insignificance seems almost noble,
A part, a parcel in a snap, remembering what part all is and
What we might say on the occasion of its vast, inscrutable turning.

(from Charles Long’s book “Significations”)