POEMS IN HOLY WEEK vii. Holy Saturday - Dead hand

A Leisure Centre in a seaside town is not the place, perhaps, to find religious devotion!  Still, it was difficult to see that this Saturday was any different from any other Saturday - and I was on the look out (for purely poetic purposes!) for any concessions to the nature of the week that we are in - at least in the western Christian tradition!
          This poem comes from observation and personal experience - both mundane, but, for me significant.  It is a feature of my photochromatic lenses that the darkened world view that they offer is not merely a wash of sepia but is altogether a more complex light denied experience!  The link to the partial eclipse that I remember in Cardiff was one of those moments of recognition that is churlish not to include in a poem!
          I sense that this poem is more explicitly bitter (especially in the title) than some of the others, but I think that this feeling fits into the sequence neatly.

Poems in Holy Week

  

vii.      Holy Saturday – Dead hand

Significance is not the operative

word that comes to mind as

I observe what’s round about.

There is no sense of waiting

for the main event.

Today is bright. 

                        

                        My glasses compensate,

and give the through-lens light a

brittle unreality that I remember

from the past eclipse; where

day was almost like it was,

but nuanced differences confused

the birds. 

                        And gave an underlying

sense of end of time to add a

piquancy to friendly drinks

as we saluted that event.

Yesterday was everyday, so will

tomorrow be, and all tomorrows

when anticipation’s bound to clocks

of dust and crucial non-events impose

itineraries on modern times.

This is the penultimate poem in the present series Poems in Holy Week, with only the Easter Day poem left to complete it.  I think it will only be when the sequence is 'finished' and I have given it some time that I will able to evaluate and start the tinkering which in some ways is the most satisfying part of writing!
          I am intimidated by tomorrow's poem as it is one of those that probably can't be moved to a different position in the sequence.
          I look forward to the challenge!