Awaiting Tomorrow

[From: “The Last Journal of Gwyllyn"] 

If in your dreams you see me wandering
through ripe wheatfields, pensive, pondering,
alone and adrift upon an ocean of grain
golden and billowing under a threat of rain,
then sing out to me from your upstairs window,
intone a bright song while the sea-zephyrs blow,
that my thoughts in the turbulent twilight air
will be mingled with a music resplendent and fair
and so ascend arrayed with both gladness and sorrow
through clouds to the starlight awaiting tomorrow.

A beautiful sadness

[From: "The Last Journal of Gwyllyn"]

A beautiful sadness, a sorrowful joy,
there are no suitable words to employ
for rightly describing this looming desire,
this living catastrophe of bright gentle fire
which blazes in darkness and thick quietude
and thunders in silence and content solitude,
with a wordless wisdom from beginning to end
unseen yet beautiful, all sorrows to mend.

How soundlessly the sunlight falls

[From: "The Life of Saint Robert Southwell, Priest and Martyr"]

How soundlessly the sunlight falls
upon the wide world after rain,
unmeasured night and fevered pain,
dispelling gloom in woodland halls.
Dewdrops cling to eyelash wings,
and eyes once more see many things.

But the objects underneath the sky,
so dear before, appear quite strange,
all stricken with some peculiar change -
as silent as death they pass me by.
The things of earth, I must confess,
now seem empty and meaningless.

But a living call is on the wind,
a breath requesting willing price,
for many souls, a sacrifice,
as new leaves shake and branches bend.
A courage swells for what may come,
be it blade or noose of martyrdom.