Advent 1 – 1 December 2021
Good morning,
It is the first of December, the first day of our advent calendar. Our theme this year is St Andrews – discovering Advent and Christmas themes with images, writing, music and more from this place. After all, many of us have spent more time at home since March 2020 than we expected.
With December comes thoughts of winter, shortening days, deepening cold, wintry weather. Here is the town from across frosty links:
And a poem from John Burnside, Professor in the University’s School of English, poet, novelist, writer of memoir. This may not be the last poem of John Burnside’s that appears in the Advent Calendar. For it seems to me that Advent themes are close to the surface of much of his work – winter, snow, annunciations, cries half-heard, longing, hope, and the possibility of a god emerging. Here is one for our first day:
Halloween
I have peeled back the bark from the tree
to smell its ghost,
and walked the boundaries of ice and bone
where the parish returns to itself
in a flurry of snow;
I have learned to observe the winters:
the apples that fall for days
in abandoned yards,
the fernwork of ice and water
sealing me up with the dead
in misted rooms
as I come to define my place:
barn owls hunting in pairs along the hedge,
the smell of frost on the linen, the smell of leaves
and the whiteness that breeds in the flaked
leaf mould, like the first elusive threads
of unmade souls.
The village is over there, in a pool of bells,
and beyond that nothing,
or only the other versions of myself,
familiar and strange, and swaddled in their time
as I am, standing out beneath the moon
or stooping to a clutch of twigs and straw
to breathe a little life into the fire.
Breathing life into embers is a lovely image for Advent – and not a bad hope for the calendar, that it breathes, and breathes life.
Yours,
Donald.