A Sparrow Alighted Upon Our Shoulders

A Poem of the Orphic-Christ and Eurydice-Magdalene.

The above audio is a piece of music called “A Sparrow Alighted Upon Our Shoulder” by Jóhann Jóhannsson from the album Orphée, which has served as inspiration for the following.

Alighting upon shoulders.

        Upon the verge,

                   The in-between.

One wing in the waking the other in dream.

He takes flight now.

With a song-story in his beak,

A song-story and a seed.

A song-story seed heard from the lyre and lips of a master poet,

A way-walker of loves mystery.

This was no lyre bird for the lyre, this tiny winged-one.

Not a nightingale befitting of such a tale. That tragedy of great antiquity.

Nor crowned and arrayed in the many colours of the sun as the golden pheasant.

But dirt brown as the earth his plumage,

An avian peasant.

Lowly sparrow.

Common in every way.

Forgotten.

Yet often, does he dig for seed, his primary food,

His eucharist,

and herein lay his fittingness for this mission of the Good.

Love is a mystery not only of the grandeur of the heavens,

But as profound, also, as the earth's inner most abysses.

As its highest heights, 

                                        mountains,

                   soaring eagle,

starry sky,

So too its deepest depths,

underworld aquifers,

                                   serpents,

                                                  and dark gods.

The seed knows and so the sparrow knows.

This sparrow had dug for a seed that had been entombed in the hands of Hades.

A song-story seed that was to be spread like wings

      on winds 

                that gave wing 

Journeying to earth's four corners,

                And through upward spiralling aeons.

From the deepest depths to the highest heights,

How could he, a mere sparrow, attain such loftiness of flight?

Does not Love makes great even the smallest of wings?

The most common of things?

        The most ordinary song?

                 The most tragic of tales?

Was not the song of Beatrice sung in the vulgar tongue?

And the greatest love shown by a carpenter’s son?

So, what of this tale the world had already heard?

Already knew so well.

He looked back! He looked back!

And she fell back to hell.

But Sparrow,

Sparrow held tight to the story of hell harrowed!

Tragedy no more, but triumph and a triumph of the heart.

Heart strings and lyre strings,

playing songs of deeply felt things.

The tortoise shell of Hermes no longer did sound lamentation

but Beauteous Ballads,

         Hymns of the Heart,

                    Chorus to Ars Cor,

                                 and Lays of Love.

Song of Songs!

And then does the soaring eagle wonder in awe!

The mountains then moved by the faith of that sparrow and his seed-song!

The stars in their glory gladly twinkle in the view of a peasant-bird’s eye.

For the seed that lay hid in Hades’ depths, in his grips,

Has seen the light of another who came for His Bride.

Has felt the vivifying waters of life,

Rivers from above,

                               And rains from below.

Wedded,

              to quench thirst and call forth leafy tongues of green flame from seed-shells.

Life! And it to the full, for souls become shells.

The Eschaton! He has touched that hidden seed,

song,

         story,

                   like summers lightening upon the night-blanketed fields.

                                             Eternal harvest it yields.

                                               Tragedy turned Glory.

The tale of Orpheus and Eurydice re-imagined by a sparrow,

Where the lines in the sand drawn by Hades’ hand

           have been crossed out.

And there in their stead?

                                           Sonnets.

Sonnets written by the Divine Poet with a dust covered finger

in the earth to His Beloved.

Lines of poetry that stayed hands gripping stones cold as death.

Sons of hades turning back now, that she would not have to.

The Bride and her Bridegroom only to remain.

Memories of the future where He calls out her name. “Mary!”

Eurydice-Magdalene and the Orphic-Christ.

Hell’s rule lies impotent, as He looks deep in her eyes.

Are you then a sparrow of a man? Of a woman?

Common? Lowly? Forgotten?

That little feathered friend alights on your shoulder also, dear one,

And goes before you now, the meekest of earth's angels. Yes!

Yet greatness is not a quality beholden to physical scale,

And the tiniest of wings gives flight to the greatest of mysteries. 

An angel out ahead, is he, and his mission cannot fail.

He harbours the seed of your song and story,

Of which the heavens do rejoice,

A Glory unto Glory.