Gwen Harwood - The Gla** Jar lyrics

To Vivian Smith A child one summer's evening soaked a gla** jar in the reeling sun hoping to keep, when day was done and all the sun's disciples cloaked in dream and darkness from his pa**ion fled, this host, this pulse of light beside his bed. Wrapped in a scarf his monstrance stood ready to bless, to exorcize monsters that whispering would rise nightly from the intricate wood that ringed his bed, to light with total power the holy commonplace of field and flower. He slept. His sidelong violence summoned fiends whose mosaic vision saw his heart entire. Pincer and claw, trident and vampire fang, envenomed with his most secret hate, reached and came near to pierce him in the thicket of his fear. He woke, recalled his jar of light, and trembling reached one hand to grope the mantling scarf away. Then hope fell headlong from its eagle height. Through the dark house he ran, sobbing his loss, to the last clearing that he dared not cross: the bedroom where his comforter lay in his rival's fast embrace and faithless would not turn her face from the gross violence done to her. Love's proud executants played from a score no child could read or realize. Once more to bed, and to worse dreams he went. A ring of skeletons compelled his steps with theirs. His father held fiddle and bow, and scraped a**ent to the malignant ballet. The child dreamed this dance perpetual, and waking screamed fresh morning to his window-sill. As ravening birds began their song the resurrected sun, whose long triumph through flower-brushed fields would fill night's gulfs and hungers, came to wink and laugh in a gla** jar beside a crumpled scarf. So the loved other is held for mortal comfort, and taken, and the spirit's light dispelled as it falls from its dream to the deep to harrow heart's prison so heart may waken to peace in the paradise of sleep.