Each year in April, Earth Month and Poetry Month coincide. Each regular issue of Newsline this April will celebrate God’s good creation and poetry with a special feature. Last week featured “Tones Like Prayers” by Brian Nixon, a writer, artist, musician, educator, and minister in Albuquerque, N.M., and a former licensed minister in the Church of the Brethren. For this week, Nixon composed two new poems for Newsline. He also wrote the story of these poems, reflecting on the meaning of this period of time in nature and the church:
A space to contemplate resurrection and life
By Brian Nixon
I composed each of these poems with the Earth Day focus in mind. After church, I walked home and settled into our enclosed front garden. Before me, pink and maroon roses stood in quiet bloom, while on the ground lay scattered confetti from our grandchildren’s Easter exploration.
With music by the German-British composer Max Richter playing softly, I began sketching images and reflections in my pocket notebook. Once the preliminary drafts were complete, I moved inside to refine them on the computer.
The piece accompanying my writing was Richter’s Perihelion. In astronomical terms, perihelion marks the point in an elliptical orbit when the sun is closest to the Earth, typically occurring in the depths of winter, around January. This made its contrast with the warmth and renewal of spring even more fitting.
For Eastertide, I drew upon the fifty-day span between Easter and Pentecost as a symbolic frame, a space to contemplate resurrection and life. It became a meditation not only on Christ’s rising, but also on the natural rhythms of the world, where death gives way, once more, to rebirth.
Perihelion
By Brian Nixon
These pink flowers,
wind-shaped,
time-pollinated,
trace an elliptical longing,
bathed in sun.
Is it the cello—
that quiet arc of sound—
the measured circumference
of motion in relation
to the air?
Or simply spring,
whispering farewell
to the night.
Eastertide
By Brian Nixon
When children at play
cast their confetti eggs to earth,
and shards of orange,
Spanish pink, plum, and crimson
scatter to the wind—
do they, like me,
with tears gathering sight,
pause to wonder
how death, once sown,
came alive again—
time its quiet midwife.
(Poems “Perihelion” and “Eastertide” copyright Brian Nixon, used with permission)
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