Aim: to stimulate, collect and illustrate creative responses from writers in the Scottish Borders to the Hawick Missal fragment, its music and the object itself.
My response: three poems – one for each colour of the Missal project (red, black and blue), each poem consisting of four lines acknowledging the number of lines of the Missal stave.
alligatum in nomine dominii
name the un men
who make of time an agony
too long have children lain at the gate
lambs under the moon, lied to without mercy
reliquiis obsequia finite
blessed with rain i sing
reliant on no saint, no miracles
no three who rust in obsequy
who lose out to flower and palm, to rose and ant and cloud and boy
salve lux mundi
let us hail the light that suns on birds in the elm
on the guiltless chorus
let us play, humble, in the sand, faces turned towards death
crying out, look, daughter, forever is a relic
The poems were constructed using words found in the Latin transcription and its translation and from vocabularies constructed from the letters of the words in the Latin phrases of the poem titles.
The found image of a black hole is from the Hubble space telescope.