A Time of Gifts
The last installment of The New Jerusalem
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This is the last piece of the small cycle called The New Jerusalem. I have really loved reading your comments and tracking your own references. We live in difficult times and I had written this in response to certain elitist moves made during the Trump administration. At times our voices are as the biblical cries in the wilderness. But we must remember when all action seems futile we respond within art, music, poetry, theater, dance, film. We send out vibrations of love to shake the foundations of evil.
I enjoyed sharing this obscure little cycle with you and hope everyone has a good night. Below is a youth with birds, as if a lost boy from Neverland.
I am so sorry that your reading of The New Jerusalem is over. I will be returning to it time and time again to discover new revelations. With this reading, I thought of the flow from the hourglass in the first poem, to the orb, to the alembic, to the alchemical cup, to the sacramental cup. All transforming in one way or another. From A Matter of Time to a Time of Gifts. I was impressed by how the mechanized birds in the first poem became the birds of innocence, perhaps of hope, around the feet of a young boy. In Neverland? How perfect. I was fascinated by how this cycle ends with the power of the Imagination, the wonder of hope. We are the holy city, the New Jerusalem. It is all up to us.
Thank you for making this a real time of gifts by sharing this extraordinary work with us. You have given us a lot but this ranks with your most magnificent of creations.
The statue of the boy with the birds reminds me of my youth in a strange way, not that I was worthy of a statue, or indeed a boy at the time (at least externally). However, I did grow up surrounded by birds as my father had an aviary and at one time housed 52 budgerigars (parakeets here). I know that I found great comfort in those birds, they were indeed my friends! I would even write Xmas cards to them all and decorate the aviary for Xmas! Still to this day, I find birds comforting during troubled times. Even during the recent pandemic when the city was bereft of the usual noise, we finally heard the real beauty of birdsong all around us:)