Advent, a season of memory
A season of hope
A looking backwards
to an old hope fulfilled
Feeds a hopeful looking forward
Memory and hope
A strained set of fellows
As hope looks forward
And memory looks back
So often the two divide
A memory of joy
In the midst of loss
Pushes pain into the future
Hope hides for a season
And for this reason seems to mock
Or a memory of shame
Excavated by accident
At the height of hope’s endeavors
Gives hope a desperate motivation
To blindly move, rebuild, and bury
Hope denying memory
Forsakes the honest maps
Forgets the tangled ways
Runs and trips into the future
New memories made worst than the first
Hope without memory to mix
A shuttered horizon
and grasping in the dark
A journey without destination
A ship without compass or stars
Advent, a season of remembering
A marriage of hope and memory
Hope recalling a hope fulfilled
Memory feeding imagination
The future brightly bursting forward
The rest of the poems from Rusten Harris’s Advent series on Moss Kingdom:
Incarnation, Christmas Eve, Kings, Some Kind of Glory, Chains, Gifts, Quotidian Couple, A Thousand Lights, Eve & Mary, Treasured Up, Christmas, Winter Staves, The Glorias, Cherubim, Joseph, Strange Redeemer, Womb, Magi, Temple Trough, Advent, Lord’s Day, Far as the Curse is Found, Jubilee, The Massacre of the Innocents, Liturgical Time
Other Advent poems on Moss Kingdom:
December 21: an Advent poem for the Winter Solstice, Of Edmund and Aslan, Tiptoe Hope, The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats