7.Feasts of November by Duncan McGibbon (good books for high schoolers .txt) 📖

/> Further killings of thousands occurred ,
star-spores, throughout nineteen forty three.


Second Entry

The subject returns finding its entry blocked.
Hanging down from the belt is a dagger
of three fainter stars,
at the centre of which is Orion's nebulae –
a cloud of gas and dust where new stars are forming,
the key modulated out of recognition.
The Orion nebula is easily visible to the unaided eye,
To the right of the W-shape, is the Andromeda Galaxy.
The hundred thousand million stars
that make up the Andromeda galaxy
are what allow us to see it over such a vast distance.
It is the most distant object
that can be seen, with Jacob’s staff pointing to the unaided eye
an eerie two point two five million light-years away.

Episode Two

First Entry

Looking to the east, you can see Orion
rising from nine pm, meaning that winter is here.
Mirphak is visible at the top-right,
in the constellation of Perseus.
In the constellation of Auriga
to the bottom left is the bright star Capella.
Below Perseus is Taurus,
with the beautiful orphan
cluster of stars called the Pléiades.

‘Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only,
our own, we see that world multiply itself
and we have at our disposal as many worlds
as there are original artists’


Answer

Also known as the seven sisters
seven stars are just about visible
to the unaided eye.
The Pleiades are about the same
size in the sky as the full Moon.
In fact, the Moon is not too far
away from the Pleiades
on twenty third and twenty fourth of November.

6. Stretto and Coda

” It is the tunic of the Lord,
the seamless gown,
which was not rent,
despite the dice throw’
followed by a cello note.

“Worlds more different from those
that revolve in infinite space,
worlds which centuries
after the extinction of the fire from
which their light first emanated send us
still each one its special radiance,
whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer.”

Have you the might to show the galaxies?

The planet Mars, the only planet that is affable
and is a wonderful sight to see ,
another treat for small telescope owners.


In the March Cosmopolitan,
the Soviet sky above Eastern Galicia,
her layered hair, those sad, brown eyes,
you walk the suburbs of time,
Gia Carangi, elle défunte, nue.

This is a rare opportunity to see a comet
with the unaided eye.

By the time the Soviet Red Army
entered Lviv, on July Twenty Sixth
Nineteen Forty Four,
only two hundred to three hundred
Jews remained,
in a small telescope throughout the winter.


Boniface proclaims the borders
of salvation, wider than Proust’s,
or Mallarmé’s original artists,
a solitary note on the oboe.

“Therefore, of the one and only Church
there is one body and one head,
not two heads like a monster; that is,
Christ and the Vicar of Christ,
Peter and the successor of Peter,
since the Lord speaking to Peter
Himself said: 'Feed my sheep'
meaning, my sheep in general,
not these, nor those in particular,
whence we understand
that He entrusted all to Peter.”

And we made His legacy
a tabernacle of hate.
Maritain’s web of contempt
he spun with Maurras
narrowing it to a museum case
of arcane lore, even the sleep-walkers
knew more of You than they.
The one-headed leech
that bled your word I cannot write

It is the tunic of the Lord,
the seamless gown,
which was not rent,
despite the dice throw
and we can remember those
who were faithful to Israel.
Under the winter triangle,
the Pre-Dog, the Dog and Betelgeuse.

He who made the seven Pleiades
and the seven main stars of Orion
and changes deep darkness
into morning, who also darkens day into night,
who calls for the waters of the sea
and pours them out on the surface of the earth.
The window, jammed open to the winter night
and the bare room empty of death.
in the mirror we believe in,
in the suburbs of loveliness:

the Lord is His name, the seamless night
that abolishes the dice-throw.

19.Depositio Sanctae Elizabeth

Schubert, Notturno played by the Janowska Orchestra, Lviv.

Kidneys, the renes searched by God
vanish in glissando flames:
in Janowska, the workers reported
the clavicle was the hardest part to burn.
On the fingerboard
of fire, muscles, pizzicato,
the spinal chord and contorted,
shoulder-blades fuse to the rib-cage
diaphragm. The heart and viscera
are long marched to tailpiece ash.
Yet this place is no go
to the flames, to be discarded, the bronchia
the core, thoracic, all for a fine, so-
stubborn, once-uttered word,
that a No-one heard.

20. UNICEF Children’s Day

Low Jupiter, the sky father set in the South West
over Thornaby, an hour after the sun.
My father turned up a page in the Eagle Annual
to teach me longer words
and I found the year’s mime again, the place
with the grey-stippled field mouse nesting
on its ball of comfort balanced and bound
to a stalk of wheat. Later under Venus,
I went outside to the backyard
and heard the children from the orphanage,
their voices indistinct in the cold night air
and I felt the awe of them, those fighters
for laughter, when the stars were already distant,
and time mummed before me, a smiling stranger,
who overtook me unless I followed.
Until that night, the siren sounded
at an unpracticed time.
Its urgent, mad sadness haunted me
and the year and the day had fled.
I would not let my parents leave the bedroom,
and knew in my blood that
there was a split in the mirror
of things kept safe that neither could see,
as it came apart in my hands.
My mother opened the curtains
through which I saw a fat tongue of flame
slobbering the farm outside
and shooting hot seeds
into an unseen wind that
swayed with burnt hate.
Those children’s voices
were seared under a dark smudge
that was their killing.
I was sat downstairs
with a glass of milk
I did not want as I knew
I would wet the bed.
knowing how to do
the take away sum
of silence after danger.

Later my father, always
the wise exorcist
of magic and fear,
took me to the farm
to show me no children died.
Yet I could see the look
in the farmer’s eyes
that told of his dear
bellowing brutes;
a word remembered,
“hibernation”, its sense
scattered on singed straw.


21. Presentation

Moist seas still warm up the winds from Iceland, reaching these splintered coasts from south west,
over the bed and breakfasts and hotels of St Mary’s Island, Tresco and Bryher.
Rainstorms are teased into gales.
On the Cairngorms rime thickens on the radio masts, then thaws. The east winds breach the seas’ pelts
bringing snow to Kent and Sussex. The nation clutches at its goods.
Ben and Anna regard our snowman as mere eccentricity compared to Morph, or Farthing Wood
in this old house we’ve moved into.

Those pictures of the child Mary: Titian’s little aristocrat in blue silk,
that was on the wall outside my father’s office.
The Très Riche Heures in Chantilly,
showed me the shape of sinlessness ;
the tiny form so awed, so small against the stone, Gothic skeleton.
In this old house...

No Jewish girl was ever offered up to the temple.
Lies we tell to grip the truth we cannot see.
Procopius, Justinian’s toady, tells us of what was to be a new temple and a new rock.
“In Jerusalem he dedicated to the Mother of God a shrine, the Nea…
Thus the church is partly based
on living rock and partly carried in the air
by a great extension, added to the hill by the Emperor's might.”
Shahrbaraz’s Sassanid Persians,
were helped by the Jews to tear the church down.
Things so precious we grip them till they break.
Her temple was the Word of her womb. On the Madaba mosaic she is Theotokos, the Woman of the
Apocalypse, her stars too old even to be new,
her body too new for time, presented to the world, a shadowless girl.
The Nea wronged this old Maccabaean House.
This feast was brought to Rome by Sistine Sixtus, yet Paul the Sixth
celebrated this Eastern passion for pure, private silence.

A near-silent wind, the whispering of long-tailed tits, ganging up with the blues and greats,
passes through the branches of Kew Gardens. That Saturday I stood by the road, having watched the
seagulls, sitting on the goalposts in Old Deer Park, all facing South into the wind, waiting for the Brent
Geese eleven. The winds have gone north. Sadness is a tearstain on a graph where love maps fear.
I have come into this garden of trees, that the day might catch you here, Our Lady of the plane trees, the
oaks, the willows and the ash that still keep old leaves in winter and the spires of hornbeams in the ruined Twickenham Baths, gilding deathless branches,
with the goodness, the unrisk of our nature:
mother of love without misgovernance.

Dead in the blizzard on Ben McDuhe, six girls and a boy who should not have ventured.
I remember the snow at St Mary’s years before, a tall girl stepping from the Aula
to the Car Park; her hair thick, smoky black and her skin, new fallen snow;
she slipped on the ice in front of me, when I should have caught her, the ice-crystals melting

on her blue mini-skirt, freezing rain on her tights. At my dim apology she limped away, breathless,
bleeding, collected her soggy notes;
things too precious to dare hold onto and which we lose.

22. Decima Kalendas: St Cecilia’s
Schubert, the B-Flat Trio
“Partly on Sensation partly on thought.”
Keats- Letter to Bailey
I. Allegro
No, your black swan was a conceptual one
about prediction, or induction.
A garden lady in the Roman sun
should translate such attention.

At Peace in St Brides they sang again and sighed.
At choral morning services played on a sacred premise.
A clergyman’s sermon lulled peace to abide,
‘pleasing and practicable to be joyful with gladness,
to serve and to express this’ musical tide.

Then to the viols and the voices of Lassus,
Palestrina, Gibbons, the sound swells wide.
Music too at the White House, Stravinsky,
Stern, Casals and Serkin, pipe-bands, jazz.

II.Andante un poco mosso...

Break his bands of sleep asunder
bam sh sh bam bam sh sh shy bam
rouse him like a peal of thunder
bam sh sh bam bam sh sh shy bam

For one brief, shining moment, don't let it be forgot
bam sh sh bam bam sh sh shy bam
That once there was a spot that was known as Camelot
bam sh sh bam bam sh sh shy bam

We'll never say goodbye. Bam-sh-baam.
Bamp-sha-bamp ... He'll never make me cry Bamp
whoo-eee whoo.. Bam-sh-boom Every time we kiss goodnight
Twelve thirty five... Klfm