MARLY YOUMANS is the author of sixteen books of poetry and fiction. Recent work includes a long poem, Seren of the Wildwood (Wiseblood), a novel, Charis in the World of Wonders (Ignatius), and a poetry collection, The Book of the Red King (Phoenicia).
’Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work’ was the President’s Choice Award
and Runner-up, Formal Verse Contest 2024, The English-Speaking Union (Victoria Branch, Australia)
Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work
A flock of images allures the monk,
Seizing hold of thought, and he remembers
Unburning limbs and leaves that waved in fire,
How branches seemed to sprout and stir in flame
As if in water, how light grew to voice
And spoke to Moses, boy fished from the Nile,
Flame becoming illuminated word,
Sight and hearing jumbled as one in play.
He hesitates and feels a burning catch
At him, his fingers with the brush and paint
Floating above the vellum quires and text…
The parchment maker and the scribe have done
Their tasks and left a space for ornament
And figures framed by snow or greenery.
And so, he thinks, a naked page is like
The Uncreated who sustains the world,
The spheres, the moon, the sky pricked out in stars.
All-things are in his care who is not-thing,
Who is the blossoming causer-to-be,
Who clasps all mortal instants that to us
Are past and present like an arrow flung
Flashing from dark to light and back again,
As if a sparrow fled the ravened night
—so black when winter’s wolves gulp sun and moon!—
Through slots in stone, into the mead-hall cheer
Of feasting, bardic song, and Christmas tales,
Only to make a calligraphic dash
Across the light and toward another gap
And then be lost in inks of mystery.
What will the art in me begin this day?
The cosmos gleams with possibility:
All space, all time, the round of season-flux,
Apocalypse of birth that cracks the dark,
Hoe-scratchings at the ground once past Twelfth Night
With milk and honey, oil and yeast slow-dripped
On turf, with mass and thrice-blessed rowan cross,
And through the cycle of the turning year.
So strange it is, this sparrow-line of us,
The tick by tick of human lives ensnared
By year-long wheels of saints and feasts and fasts.
We are the sparrow with its dark-light-dark
Of arrow flight that’s fletched with pain and joy,
And we are dancers weaving in a ring
Of births and deaths and resurrection days,
Fragrant with the scents of hay and flower.
His hand trembles, the sable hair of the brush
Is blued with azurite, and now he sees
The unconsuming flames of burning bush
And hears sigla and words in hawthorn ink
Begin to scatter notes and sing for him,
Below the blanks that soon will come to be
The rich illuminations of the year,
The glass-locked stream, the flag-decked castle spire,
A prince with hound and hunting tapestry
And board with gold salt cellar and venison,
Some peasants warming their backsides by a fire,
Tunics and gowns a hoisted comedy.
He ponders the hoop of seasons and how it is
The sparrow flies in straightness like a pin…
His hand dips and he makes first marks in blue
As he dreams that linear or rounded time’s
A pin of gold and a jeweled, hammered hoop:
The ring-brooch on a cloak of endlessness,
Abundance of the uncreated light.
MARLY YOUMANS is the author of sixteen books of poetry and fiction. Recent work includes a long poem, Seren of the Wildwood (Wiseblood), a novel, Charis in the World of Wonders (Ignatius), and a poetry collection, The Book of the Red King (Phoenicia).
’Ælfstan the Illuminator Begins a Work’ was the President’s Choice Award
and Runner-up, Formal Verse Contest 2024, The English-Speaking Union (Victoria Branch, Australia)
