photography and digital painting by Mark R. Turner, 2003-2019. Get your copy HERE.
I am glad to have awakened to a fuller celebration of this season as Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. Years ago I began to feel there is more to the holidays than the collection of beautiful traditions around Christmas.
My poem here bridges the three parts of the season showing:
Advent’s message of light and darkness, seeking, prophecy, the journey into enlightenment
Epiphany’s message of following the call, the star as light in the darkness, undertaking the journey of transformation
Christmas as the pivot point of the seeking and transformation, in this poem/carol it is the unseen power behind the scenes
This is one poem and picture of 12 in my new ebook Verse & Vision from Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. You can get a free copy through January 6 (end of Epiphany 2020) by signing up for our monthly e-mail. See the sign-up form at the top of this page. See the book at horizongate.com/VrsVsns.
Since writing the poem I have carried in my imagination music to make it an Advent carol. Finally this year I set the poem to music which you may download HERE and sing. I hope you can sing it with all four parts and hear the harmonies.
I lay me down all dark and cold
Between the winter’s pallid fold
And groaned the weary prayer of old,
“Where can seeing be?”
Will night time ever come to end?
Can I the bondage never bend?
The suffocating dark amend?
“Where can seeing be?”
Speak over wasteland strewn with bone
Where pilgrims fell on journeys lone
To grasp and make the day their own.
“Where can seeing be?”
The specks of light afar will tell
The story I have craved so well
Of sunrise reaching into hell
“Where can seeing be?”
So, coming I have groped for Thee.
A star arising beckoned me
To journey from another sea
“Where can seeing be?”
And standing weary at your door
The mud you wash from my eyes sore
And wake me from the sightless war.
I Thy face can see.
Mark R. Turner
El Cajon, Calif.
December, 1999
