Earth’s Enigmas: A lost poem

Here is a little Boxing Day holiday diversion.

Readers of this blog may remember that some time ago, I told the story of how I came to write a sequence of poems, arranged in seven pairs, about Seven Heavens, responding to The Music of the Spheres, the wonderful music which Marty O’Donell composed for the game Destiny. (you can read that blog post Here)

In that post I included a link to a video made by a group of players which incorporated with the music and my poems. that video was for Luna, the first of the spheres. They will be posting the rest of those poems in the new year. But in the meantime, as a kind of extra, they have a made a video of another poem I wrote for Bungie and their game Destiny, though this poem was never used in the game. It came about like this: In order to write my sequence for the Spheres Marty sent me over all the music but we also discussed the themes of the game together and he let me into some of its key ideas and images, and something of its over-arching story. The key images he shared with me, images of a lost golden age, of an encroaching darkness, of Guardians who kept up a hope of recovery, of a traveller who could bring redemption, all these of course already had poetic and spiritual resonance for me. Bungie had not specifically asked for another poem but I wrote this one anyway. It is a series of gnomic utterances or enigmatic sayings in tightly rhymed tetrameters which I wrote partly in response to the architecture and story line of the game, but also as a distillation of some of my own thought and faith. The copyright still belongs to Bungie, but to give you a flavour, here are a couple of Stanzas, which might have some oblique resonance in this season of Advent, Nativity, and Epiphany:

Who can count the ages gone?

Who can hear the hidden song?

Who is he who feels and hears

Long-lost music of the spheres?

Hears the secret symphony

Sevenfold in harmony

Sounding present, future, past

Who will hear the call at last?

 

Far above the city’s domes

Seek the traveler when he comes

Even in the blackest night

From the darkness springs a light

Find the end where you begin

Light without and light within

Seek the secret sages know

Light above and light below

 

I have recorded the whole poem for them and they have a made a video of it, which has now been posted and you can view it here:

Perhaps it will make a little mytho-poeic listening and viewing for these holidays!