Paraclesis

I wrote this one just today, or rather, it seems to have written itself. Where the circus rider image came from I will never know!

While a Paraclesis is a specific litergical and poetic form in Orthodox Christianity, Called a Supplicatory Canon in English, I used the greek word Paraclesis here merely in its more general sense of asking for comfort. Apologies for my unlovely Greek pronunciation.

Paraclesis

Ah! Heaven, haunt me here,

Here among these broken hours,

These fallen towers of time

Where tears flow and terror flowers,

And all seems blasted

By the unlastingness of love!

Reach me Your hand and rescue me,

That I may stand a little steadied

Atop the white tips of the waves

Of this life which lies before me

As circus riders balance bravely

On the backs of hurrying horses

Which course without care beneath them,

Bearing them onward in their hellish haste!

Compel me with Your pregnant peace

To work against the entropy

So central to this place of perishing,

Which only grace can shake

And make of it the garden we have lost!

Seduce me now, another Eve,

As surely as the snake seduced the first,

And teach me to taste Your tang upon the wind,

That ceaseless wind which brings all things to dust,

And yet must carry couched within it

The other wind which does not wound

But wills our wandering footsteps homeward!

Ah! Bear my bruised and broken body

To where the desire of my half-dead heart

Will meet among the green and gold and azure hangings

Of the marriage bed of eros and agape

Its eternal and undying end,

Which is to lie, alive at last,

In the sweet embrace of endless joy!

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