Three sonnets by John O'Donohue
gabby...@westnet.com.au
These are the three sonnets I posted years ago. We have used The Annunication and The Nativity at Nine Lessons, but The Visitation is very powerful as well.
The Annunciation –John O’Donohue
Cast from afar before the storms were born
And rain had rinsed the darkness for colour,
The words have waited for the hunger in her
To become the silence where they could form.
The day’s last light frames her by the window,
A young women with distance in her gaze.
She could never imagine the surprise
That is hovering over her life now.
The sentence awakens like a raven, fluttering and dark,
Opening her heart to nest the voice
That first whispered the earth,
From dream into wind, stone, sky and ocean,
She offers to mother the shadow’s child,
Her untouched life becoming wild inside.
The Visitation
In the morning it take the mind a while
To find the world again, lost after dream
Has taken the heart to the underworld
To play with the shades of lives not chosen.
She awakens a stranger in her own life,
Her breath loud in the room full of listening.
Taken without touch, herflesh feels the grief
Of belonging to what cannot be seen.
Soon she can no longer bear to be alone.
At dusk she takes the road to the hills.
An anxious moon doubles her among the stone.
A door opens, the older one’s eyes fill.
Two women locked in a story of birth
Each mirrors the secret the other heard.
The Nativity
No man reaches where the moon touches a women.
Even the moon leaves her when she opens,
deeper into the ripple in her womb
that encircles dark, to become flesh and bone.
Someone is coming ashore inside her:
A face deciphers itself from water
And she curves around the gathering wave,
Opening to offer the life it craves.
In a corner stall of pilgrim strangers
She falls and heaves, holding a tide of tears.
A red wire of pain feeds through every vein,
until night unweaves and the child reaches dawn.
Outside each other now, she sees him first
Flesh of her flesh, her dreamt self.