Carol - Poetry by George Mackay Brown

In the first darkness, a star bled.

The war of cloud and summit, other wounds.

Hills cupped their hands

And the rain shone over knuckles of rock and dropped to the

            sources.

Precious that well-hoard.

The priests gathered in secret jars

Lustrations for the passionate and the dead.

You were blessed, young tree

With one apple.

Far on you must bear five godwounds, prefigured and red.

The deer runs on, runs on, swiftly runs on

Before bird and arrow,

Then bends, obedient to the arrow, its branching head.

A hunter’s hand has broken the wild grape

To stain and seed.

And the hunter’s hill opened with a green sound,

A stalk of corn,

And the blacksmith took from his forge a powerful blade.

Now this, a cry in our atom-and-planet night –

A child’s wailing.

A child’s cry at the door of the House-of-Bread.

George Mackay Brown (1921 – 1996)

Taken from The Twelve Poems of Christmas, Volume Three, Selected and Introduced by Carol Ann Duffy