Chalice (a hitherto unpublished poem by Norman Morrissey)

With the days so suddenly summery, hammocking in the cool Green Nook is possible again. And then, by some idle chance I happened upon this moving poem, more crystalline than any photograph could muster for the moment it captures; a poem I don't remember hearing or reading before, utterly humbling for the love my husband felt for me; and archetypal in the pure man-love it conveys towards a chosen woman -

Chalice

To see you rocking in your hammock
in the old place
(that once was a sylvan nook in the formal, dressed-stone

garden I had
before my heart broke
and the wilderness tangled in

like the jungle over a Mayan temple
but now has been
trimmed back into My-Lady's-Bower's sweet symmetries)

was to see an elvish thing
bobbing in a curled leaf
on a gentle stream;

it was to feel my dream of these past years
- you finding a haven
where your own heart's time

can brim over
to make this new home I offer you
with both hands on bended knee

fit chalice
for your heart's
welling abundancies

to
be
drunk from.

- Norman Morrissey

Us in the "sylvan nook". Photo taken by my mom.