Tuesday, February 17.15

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A Morning of Bitter Cold
(with homage to Boris Pasternak)     

At the upstairs morning window, black coffee steams in a large white cup. The midwinter sun rises with pale frozen light. I read the rich, impoverished poems of old Russia—the ancient mothering land. She weeps for unknown millions of deaths from the Revolution and decades of totalitarian regimes. Her sorrow is that of a young peasant woman, a widow left with fatherless children, a weedy garden, a bottle of vodka and a balalaika. Hers are true songs from the hinterlands of the heart, the plucked strings of human joy, and pain.  

The laughing aspens are always there, ever windblown. How their roots thirst down into the Slavic soil, fertile with blood and bones. The aspens release their windy yellow leaves spinning with wet snow like the veils of widows, wailing Orthodox funerals draped with purple and lace. Each night, the vast upturned bowl of Russian sky, deep with stars and black with grief, glitters down to the steppe’s black rim.

But I look up, and out into the present morning, these brittle frosted flowers of light. And again I am torn, looking back behind the mirror, and out into the world: a man born with one life, two thirsting souls. One endears the small pathetic words, the buried passions of humankind ravaged with personal wars. He knows they all secretly hunger— a few sweet crumbs of the broken, “the true and living Bread”. How the ancient holy writings rise in us with a nourishing mystery—the yeast of living Words— wanton to lift us into human love, to break our pride with the grist of divine truth.

Down below, scattered among the seeds I’ve thrown like words to the frozen ground, peck the pitiful and hungry birds. They steal out of the dark forest to feed. Each morning, I cherish the honest brotherhood of their warm and fragile blood. Summer and winter they eat and fight and love, weave nests and tend their eggs and fledglings with devotion, survive the hawks and the killing cold. They cast no votes. 

But this other soul wants something more than words. He is forever looking out, a lean golden hawk. He is like the winter morning sun, finding far and close the wild and radiant communion of life, and death—-a complex community of warm lives, kindled with the one fire of all Being. He is vigilant, perched with talons fiercely clutched. Yet thrilled, watching storms and rising stars. He yearns the sleeping folded flowers to wake, and break open again, soft petals of fragrant pastel light. Listening, he hears the unwritten scriptures of morning wind, of hard blue frost, the lost flutter of wings. His spirit deeply feeds on the meager, hungering songs of a few winter birds releasing crumbs of praise.

How seemingly unlike, these two disparate souls! Yet they live in the one man, so variously in love—with the one wild and tender God.

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–Quilla

February 17, 2015 | Categories: Meditations | Tags: birches, death, funerals, grief, joy, love, orthodox faith, pain, Pasternak, poetry, prose-poems, Russia, Russian poetry, snow, the land, war | Leave a comment