Picture the scene

Snow scene
Paints  times of nostalgia
Quintessential village landscape
Bedecked with a blanket of snow
The coverall.
Happy families skipping 
by the river path
To the kismet bridge
Beneath the star that was foretold.
And beneath the snow
Under that cloak of invisibility 
What lies there on a cold winter night of glad tidings;
Do you know?
Have you watched the homeless 
Beg in the shopping mall
And the destitute turn to crime
Or shoot their own stars
So they too can dream of fluffy white*
Marshmallow clouds in the arms 
Of evergreen Christmas trees?
Yet it’s Christmas, a time of winter cheer
Giving and goodwill; give it a thought.

I was attracted by this lovely snow scene in the barber’s window and in most of the small shops in town a different if similar Christmas snow scene. So lovely and happy and it did in fact raise my spirits to see it. However, as I sat down to write the poem twisted itself as I thought and saw that our preparations leave the poor and destitute even further behind. A time of goodwill and giving to others has been turned inward and made a gluttony of excess. In my local town the churches have thankfully set up night shelters for the 3 months of December January and February and Christmas Day itself promises to be special. I wonder what Christmas specials are happening in your towns?

  • Image from the Song It’s a Marshmallow World in the Winter: lyrics © Shapiro Bernstein & Co. Inc.

 

Words and photo by Englepip.

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Daily Prompt: A mythical

Digital Artwork by Englepip©

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Let me tell you a story.

In a time before Time there was everything but it was  tiny and dense and so condensed it could not breathe. It was so  lonely and desolate that in the denseness and vacuity of such barrenness, in order to escape the silence and suffering; the torment and darkness and the heart-ache of being unable to touch and feel, that in its anger, it exploded with rage.

Such an explosion in the heat of fury was never experienced both ever and never again.

And the fierceness of what could have been destruction spread in  an instant,  a ferocious furnace of passion reaching out into the nothingness that lay beyond. Bursting into the darkness it brought light, light which swirled in a cloud of gas which burned with the brightness and intensity we call stars.

And the nothingness became  a canopy of tinkling specks as though a black velvet cloak was speckled with diamonds,

And the brightness of the stars could not be ignored and some grew and some died and some expanded and some shrank back into nothingness and some are yet to be born.

And each starsun gathered around it a comforting blanket, a soup of creation, a cloud of gas and from that gas came dust that pervaded every space that was Space in that spiral or galaxy. And each star in its creation reached out and began to gather the gas into dust and populate the nothingness with balls of planets which would dance to their tune and run rings around them just as all children do to their parents. And as they twisted and turned  from light to shade so there was darkness and night and light and day.

And of the suns, there was just one  that shone with particular kindness and  harboured the light of creation, which gathered a wondrous swirl of ether and dust around it.  And in that  dust there emerged  one particular blue orb hanging in the unseen attraction of its orbit; a blue planet, where the gases modified together to form air, where the dust became land and the hydration of its rocks formed water.

Then without hesitation there came life. At first  in the depths of the darkest ocean trenches and bubbling on the surface in the air until it swam in shoals across the seas, hiding in the corals, leaping from the waters in the air and to land, where it ran riot in the ferns and flew through the air and ran across the surface on four and then two legs and became ……man. 

And when you look up at the stars tonight or shade your eyes as you look to the sun, remember how you came to be; how many millennia have passed since your beginning and how you are but a speck  in an eternity which has passed from darkness into light and from nothingness into being and from stark loneliness and isolation to the vividness of colour sound and feeling that is our world. Treasure that creation and fear not that you have the privilege, when the time comes, to return to what you once were. “Dust to dust.” For out of that dust came everything.

This story is copyright to Englepip. It is not intended to be scientific and neither is it intended as religious in content, but just a myth or story which came to me in response to the Daily Prompt and the following extract from Wikipedia.

The various planets are thought to have formed from the solar nebula, the disc-shaped cloud of gas and dust left over from the Sun’s formation. The currently accepted method by which the planets formed is accretion, in which the planets began as dust grains in orbit around the central protostar.    (Wikipedia)

I hope you like it.

via Daily Prompt: Planet