Inspired by the Fantasia On A Theme by Thomas Tallis: Ralph Vaughan Williams
Sunlight scouts the forest’s weak points
And glints through dark birch parapets
Across the late morning,
This late Easter morning.
We came looking for hope,
To pause our dissertation on sadness and despair
For those we have lost;
To smell the Spring, all sweet and fecund;
To see the evidence of resurrection.
In the clearing, a process and a place today,
We hear that chord: strident, promising
Flattened and incomplete,
Then, from somewhere deep within the earth
The baseline heartbeat canon,
Which pulses strong again as if from nothing,
And shows we can indeed rise up from beds of death.
Then I see the bluebells, boisterous, on the march,
In rampant progress across the forest floor.
Thus re-connected to my optimistic self, I smile,
Past, present, future are in communion once more.
Easter Sunday, 2017
