Deep-furrowed like a brow in mourning The dark has held me fast and tight While majestic beings ponder And deliberate my mortal plight. But now starry conferences adjourning Dispersing with the ebb of night At once the firmament is cleft asunder By the angel of the morning light. And on new born pinions of the…
Author: Max Leyf
Poem: “Arise my love, and come away,” or “to the New Year”
Arise my love, and come away The year is spread before us, The songbirds sing to greet the day Arise and join the chorus! Arise my love, and come away For time is on our side, Arrayed as for a wedding day And life shall be our bride! Arise my love, and take my hand…
Poem: “Living tabour, singing chime”
Now to you I sing: O! heart, Ceaseless weaver of the time You also never fail to temperately keep Tireless of foot, lithe of love of rhyme Living tabour, singing chime The skies you sound and also wed The Heavens to the Earth and Oceans deep The limbs your bark, your captain head, The seas…
Poem: “Firstborn of Creation: Light”
Firstborn of Creation: light Longs for death in darkness and rebirth as sight The ancient wind that onetime swirled and sung Through stars and nebulae when worlds were first begun Now wafts as breath and fills this being’s lungs And fire, sacred primordial fire Onetime spanned the ancient sky And smelted gold of Apollo’s lyre…
Sonnet (12): “Therefore, send me…”
“Behold! Upon the Earth the mists arise As faceless legions that emerge in throngs Confounding speech and stifling song And lo! A creature, poor, despised Stumbling, confused by engines of demise Stranded in a season she does not belong Abandoned by her ancient gods since long Departed thence to seek more temperate skies— “Therefore, send…
Two Winter Poems
In the midnight of the world When time reposes in itself And silence swallows up our words The void is pregnant with tomorrow A secret hidden in the darkness A prophecy concealed in lines “Eat the book,” the angel says “And in the darkness read the signs.” The lamp is hid beneath a…
Sonnet (11): “Lo! I will be with you always”
A dying ember swallowed up by grey A swansong born on golden pinions bright Sings the solemn psalm of fateful night Of the hero who had held our plight at bay, With single hand had mastered winter’s sway Now fallen with the fading of the light A shadow only of his onetime might An echo…
Nine short verses, daughters of the Autumn Muses
The sunlight streams from distant spaces To shower green with golden graces Then the fire-spirits set the fields alight And soon frost-giants descend with night All enchantments withal to wither As ice-fogs plunder hither, thither Now the light longs to rejoin its kind May it find release inside my mind! And there communion too, And…
“Before the world was made I knew her”
Before the world was made I knew her Her joy was my completion and delight She was my only muse and inspiration By her breath the days were numbered The seasons were her days and nights For her the depths and heights were sundered The axis of the world became here spine To join the…
“The Light of the World”
Light in the world World in the light I am in the world; I am in the light And the light is in me The light becomes sight in me, and life in me The life becomes love in me Love in the world
