Good Friday in Wales

MEDITATION ROOM

My mother’s late twin watercolor

(Bardsey Island, 2002).  Dark

room, light room.  Look

through the window to the cemetery –

crumbled walls in Wales, a stony cross.

Pale green as early April

outside the infirmary – still,

fresh, frail.  Her final brush with grass,

her hopeful air.  The Boanerges

were the Sons of Thunder –

redheads, most likely – Dioscuri

in their scarlet robes – woodpeckers,

Thunderbirds (like my two redhead brothers).

Dakota found him on the earth

near Red Wing – red-feathered

Thunder-Birdman (portent for Little Crow).

Thunder-&-lightning were one mighty Bird –

a firebird, roaring crimson.

Fire-flinging wingèd one –

a Persian peacock (Rhody Red?)

or Phoenix, soaring like a rainbow

from gray winter ash.

Woodpecker, with his calabash

tap-tapping oaks for golden honey-glow

Morse codes the closing of an Iron Age

& restoration of that Paradise

the Son of Davy Jonah scries

from his doom-rood.  Just turn the page,

                    *

he cries.  Along this feathered spine

where all the leaves are bound,

your legend of Twin-Town –

refuge for sacred monsters (in a pine

grove, under Ariadne’s Crown,

northward of everywhere).

The holy child of Mary

is such a singularity.  Scapegoat-twin,

divine-human, he will dethrone the kings

with goldenrod of charity;

rise from his bed of cruelty

with flames of sunflower – with Easter wings.

Just beyond my mother’s watercolor

David Jones grotto, I glimpse

tall flickering cave-nymphs…

a moonlit retina (of temple vault, pillar).

Twin rooms, of light & dark, enclosed

(like matryoshka dolls) inside

each other.  Casket-scaffold

for a model ship, perhaps?  Micòl's

canoe?  A meditation room

for mourning Magdalen.

Through tears of rage… vision.

A ragged almond tree, coming to bloom;

immense pressure of gravity, around a shell;

the coracle of wounded heart

lifting as purple columbine – a spurt

from humming bird-nest (thunder-sky-well).

4.10.20