Elaine E. Belz
Hymn For the Longest Night in Advent.

There are times when I am so mindful of the life
Growing inside me
That it seems to also saturate the world around:
These tiny leaves that twirl down to meet me,
Kindred withered things,
That pass from their former greenness by the arrangement
Of seasons, and fall
With such levity;
Damp chilled air that hovers
Like a promise of ensuing warmth -
These are the portents of hope known by
The cold and lonely.

A shrivelled leaf falles out of frigid air,
And I, who choose to hope,
Must confess that I know only the weight
Of believing, and wonder
If I wouldn't rather
Feel myself absorbed into the void of the empty night sky.

  My tiny messanger of hope
Crumbles at my touch. In the distance,
Lit and unlit windows
Speak in cryptic patterns,

Like the few stars emerging from heaven tonight,
Like the flashing beacons of radio towers,
Like the questions
That spin in my mind, refusing
Even to be formulated -

Thoughts I wear like a thick skin
Against the cold
As all pretense of contact
Retracts, and the world sinks back
Into the impenetrable dark. It needs
Nothing from me.

The sun
Is invisible now, but it burns tirelessly, fueling
Even cold night.

The void
That presses against my skin,
That surrounds everything in space,
That swallows everything in time,

Also relentlessly burns, but cannot consume me. My life
Is buried deep inside,
Embalmed in past appearances, waiting to be recollected
Like a long-forgotten promise - waiting
To be born anew

Into this world full of
Life that is separate from me, hiding behind its own
Thick skins: tree bark, brick and concrete,
Headlight glare, human flesh, night sky,
The negative space that implies,
Like a question,
The yet-unknown object of my belief.

The answers
Will be ordinary. The prophets
Will wear the faces of my neighbors, speak to me
In my own dialect, and I will understand them
Through my senses: the same ordinary means
By which I interpret the universe of sense
That enwraps me, the universe of which
My body and its senses
Are a part.

  Immersed as I am
In routine and emptiness,
Will I fail to recognize it?
Another leaf falls,
And I reach out to touch it -
A gesture that is no more faith
Than desperation.

All my experience,
And all my memory,
And all my knowledge,
My collected bits of the appearances of Life
Converge

As at the intersection point
Between ancestry and descendence;

And the void
In which I exist
Exhales its silent chill,
Becomes a sanctuary
For the hope that grows inside me:

The future drawn out of my past - a mystery
Birthed in the familiar,
Nursed in my own being,
Destined to transcend me. It will begin
In the immediacy and subjectivity
Of my own sight and touch and hearing,
And will unfold forever - boundless as the ever-growing
Ever-cryptic universe.

Is it enough to believe?

  The dark world reaches out with wind to brush my cheek,
And I feel its cold penetrate my skin.

©1998 Elaine E. Belz. All rights reserved. This poem was included as the B-side in the promotional chapbook "#6895/Hymn for the Longest Night in Advent", ZPC-9801. Also included were "Social Contract," "Outside," and "Last Call."