hey josephine kate
welcome to this wild wide world
you will grow in love –
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each newborn baby
has wise ones who come to bless,
bring gifts, praise, omens:
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caspar, melchior,
balthasar – kings with gold, frankincense
and myrrh – following a star.
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written in the god book
we glow like spells of unspelled words
on the unscrolled page
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will we float in light
like morning mist on frost still white
as night’s evening dawns –
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will we make our homes
watched by the gods of ourselves
scanning our future?
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written in that god book
spells untold on unscrolled page
speak the unspelled age.
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**
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freddie omm
epiphany 2020
Our cousin, Josephine Kate Bader, was born on Christmas Day 2019, making triply apt this Epiphany welcome on Twelfth Night, the night of the Magi’s visit.
The Magi, or Three Kings, bringing their gifts to the baby Jesus, from a 6th century mosaic at Sant’Appolinaire Nuovo, in Ravenna.
Quite beautiful, and full of measured hope for the newborn.
Thank you very much, Becky.
I love this.
The poet as a fourth magi, bringing blessings.
And a fourth “wise one” making clear that the future remains unwritten, and that:
‘we glow like spells of unspelled words
on the unscrolled page”
Words as yet unwritten cast their spells on the page of the present, as of the future.
For me, the key to this poem lies in its final haiku. There, the narrator writes of untold spells, and immediately one wonders whether this means that there are uncountably many spells, whether they are spells that simply haven’t yet been made, or indeed both.
In all those interpretations, meaning and significance are immanent.
(And, during epiphany, which is, in part, the subject of this poem, meaning is made manifest.)
This is important, because the untold spells “speak the unspelled age”.
Again there is that inescapable tension between the unspelled age as one that simply hasn’t happened yet (and is therefore unspoken and undescribed), and “unspelled” in the sense of an age that doesn’t believe in spells, magic, faeries, and the supernatural, and finally there is “unspelled” in the sense of an “illiterate” age.
The “unscrolled page”, also, refers to a web page that hasn’t yet been scrolled through.
This poem is about potentiality and the immanence of meaning and significance in the life of the newborn baby – whereby the shift to “we” in the fourth haiku also universalizes the depiction of blessings, gifts, praises and omens.
One implication is that meaning and significance are made significant in our lives, or “made manifest” in the term appropriate to the epiphany, when they articulate themselves (or are articulated or “spoken”) in words of poetry.
It is also about the unknowability, the mystery of life.
That is inspired by the great mystery of birth.
And it is about how the incantatory powers of words and poetry, like a spell, suffuse our lives with meaning, so that we truly “speak” our life and turn it into poetry. Or perhaps it is better to say that it is the poetry which becomes our life.
That is the wish, the gift, that the poet brings, like a fourth king indeed, as Scarlett says.