Honey (Apollon)
So you come to me godly,
pierced is my temperate sleep.
And in this dream you become –
the gilded, the greater,
the gentlest god.
You dance through every wind,
unseen, and sing through thunder
and birdsong:
the swan abandons its muteness for
the sake of your message,
which ripples
through water, and in the earth
flowers into the placid hues that
dissolve in the horizon,
transformed to pure light,
stable in the nightsky.
There I find you still,
in evening chill,
a quiver of a prophetic word –
a blindness, a gift.
The sun ignites flames,
lingering loyal at your back.
When we were child,
o comely dayborn,
we were child of the night –
in wait for the day the sun would go out,
communing with visions
of the unchangeable future
and refusing to keep stride.
Yet now, still in youth,
honey, coated fingertip, drips
down the lyre string.
O my dear divinely inspired,
your harmonious hand a rescue
from a world best veiled to me,
and so by fate I do see:
Upon the crown of your head
a halo of light,
within the grasp of my hands
victory – might.
Painting by: Simon Vouet (1590-1649)
