Читать книгу The Sunrise Liturgy - Mia Anderson - Страница 8

Half past dawn for us mixed mortals

and the frozen birch tree is doing as good a job

of feeding the grosbeaks as the frozen apple tree.

When they swirl away from their délices de sorbet aux pommes

(McSorbet) in the winter sun

they head for the top of the birch and snack on its catkins.

Of the five, two

have red breasts, sharply V-shaped sharp red and

they are pecking themselves, those two,

strenuously pecking their breasts…

can this really be grooming?

Isn’t that blood they’re feeding on? ’Struth!

I know it’s cold out, but.

Ah, they fly away, with the others,

as living as ever.

Flip the pages. The rose-breasted grosbeak… sure enough

a V like a dagger in the chest.

Have you heard the one about the pelican?

Mother pelican performs own breast surgery, beak like a dagger,

feeds its young

with gobs of its own blood.

Have you heard the one about the pelican chick?

An insurance chick gets laid, one egg alongside the favoured egg

and when the favoured egg hatches and thrives

the ‘insurance chick’ gets pushed out of the nest.

That’s it for the chick.

For this it came.

So which is for real?

Both are. Different iconographies.

In the Other Book it’s the iconography of fittedness —

multiple wasted experiments of how to get along in this world.

A zero sum game,

it worked for pelicans.

Pelican so loved the world

that she gave her other begotten one, to the end.

Now all that believe in Pelican

shall not see ‘Pelican’ perish but have persistent life.

In the book that’s called The Book, it’s science lesson 101

before the burning bush : ‘Turn aside.’

See why the branches are not consumed.

‘Wisdom :

attend!’

Asidedness.

The grosbeak as burning bush

step one on the marathon of self-offering

that burns and burns and is not consumed.

The iconography of cathedral glass, bronze, stone,

Latin’s Pie Pelicane, the ancient christic image.

And we : in the image, we say. Pelicans unlimited.

‘We offer and present unto thee… ourselves, our souls and bodies,

to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice…’

(Cranmer’s 16th century take on Paul of the Book).

You mean really? You mean do?

As a race, we have a pretty clear notion of where

one skin stops and another begins. We’re good at boundaries.

We could push the chick from the nest — we’re

the favoured chick.

My pain is not yours, and vice versa.

At least we live as if that’s what we thought.

But the pelican of Christology and legend, that’s

a horse of another feather.

Someone called it

‘absolute donation’.

What if

drawing your own blood to feed others

blood donorship in clinical quiverfuls of mystic syringes

what if sheer cliff-edge generosity

absolute donation

were the bull’s-eye of every post-communion prayer? For real?

I think we might lose our sense of skin, of whose pain is whose,

of where

the edge of the nest is.

That would be novel.

We might feel the pain of the Congo.

Or would that be asking

more than we’re up for?