“The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light.” Isaiah 9:2
It is almost the winter solstice when the tilt of the Earth’s axis
faces farthest away from the sun (even as its orbit reaches closest)
and the sun on the horizon halts like a ball thrown up attains apex
of its rise and for an instant is still before falling back down to gravity:
Christmas will be the day the orb Earth sees the ball of the sun
slide back toward the equinox about lunar based Easter-tide.

Already I am imagining the Triple Spiral Labyrinth based on the design
on the rock that sits at the entrance to New Grange, a burial passage cave
in the Boyne River Valley north of Dublin, Ireland where each year the sun
lines up with the lintel over the door to the tunnel lined with carved giant stones
that lead the light on the shortest day down to the cairn so deep set in the hill.

I see the triple spiral design I have made of the petro-glyph outside the passage
and doodle it again on the page of writer’s prompts. All these lines progressing
the slope of the page are this Sisyphean trek on paper worlds where we have
been pushing, doodling, drawing the great rock of democracy, the burden
of the welfare of all the people, and indeed all the life structures alive
photo allied with the sun itself deep down in the Earth waiting for light
to take away the darkness of slavery time — Electoral College 3/5 person
for owner’s representation, no vote for the slaves thus represented,
Jim Crow gerrymandering and voter suppression, corporate duopoly and
media, awash in dark money and dark banking , fraud made legal, a vote
counting system dark as courts declare its base digital code a proprietary
asset only the corporations can know, can know, and I see Sisyphus rolling
his triple spiral stone down in New Grange to wait, wait for the solstice
                                and the light.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.