I can’t remember where I first heard the sonnets of Malcolm Guite. I bought his book Sounding the Seasons earlier this year but decided to wait until the beginning of the church liturgical year before pulling it out to read. This morning over coffee I opened it for the first time.

This is from his The Great O Antiphons series for Advent.

dawn, Easter Morning, over the Salish Sea

O Oriens

 

First light and then first lines along the east

To touch and brush a sheen of light on water,

As though behind the sky itself they traced

The shift and shimmer of another river

Flowing unbidden from its hidden source;

The Day-Spring, the eternal Prima Vera.

Blake saw it too. Dante and Beatrice

Are bathing in it now, away upstream . . .

So every trace of light begins a grace

In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam

Is somehow a beginning and a calling:

‘Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream

For you will see the Dayspring at your waking

Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking.’