Dorothy Alexander

Poetry and fiction in Scots and English

Inside

  • Welcome
  • About
  • cage
  • eco series/Final Warning
  • ballads
  • Mined
  • Artlink Project
  • Hawick Missal Fragments Project
  • The Mauricewood Devils
  • Current projects
  • Creativity generator workshop
  • Events archive

Hawick Missal Fragments Project

 

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

https://dorothyalexander.typepad.com/files/alligatum-jpeg.jpg

 

 

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

https://dorothyalexander.typepad.com/files/reliquiis-jpeg-1.jpg

 

 

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

https://dorothyalexander.typepad.com/files/salve-blue-jpeg.jpg

 

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.