L'aura del Campo

Missal from Thor? The Celestial Spiral in Norway.

I decided to write a quick poem about this event:



Today's scribble

Missal

In a spiral of blue against a northern sky,
a sign of wonder to the naked eye,
a celestial missal from Thor.

Light swirls away in a blue-green blur,
leaves the fishermen in twilit Tromsø
alone with their thoughts at the wharf:

is it a White Sea missile from an unseen source,
a Thor-sent kiss or a blue flamed torch,
an epistle of peace or war?

Go wake King Harald to come into town
On Thor's day another has come to be crowned:
bring frankincense and myrrh.

© Kåre Enga [166.335] 2009-12-10

Sketching it out:

Advice: never try to write to an event! Especially as it happens. Gawd... this sucked to write... No one in America is going to know how to pronounce Tromsø [trom.suhr] and Skjerøy [sher.uhree] is worse (think French coeur but without the 'r' or in the second case 'oy' rounded and fronted), so 'blur' in the previous line helps... I hope. It's as close as I could get. And someone will ask what missal means when all they have to do is google it or open a dictionary: missal, a book of religious liturgy (noun: (Roman Catholic Church) a book containing all the prayers and responses needed to celebrate Mass throughout the year).

Plus... writing to something momentary like this means that it must be written immediately. Snooze you lose, it's yesterday's news and like fish doesn't keep well. In this case, today is Human Rights Day and the day the Nobel Peace Prize is given.

Barack Obama's speech verbatim: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2009/12/obama-verbatim-a-ju...

By-the-way, Harald is king of Norway. Thursday is Thor's day or 'torsdag'. yadda yadda yadda. Shoot me for trying!

Some Norwegian who has eaten too much lutefisk might understand (poor fella) and thank me though.

The truth? A Russian Bulava missile misfired from the White Sea.

The pretty picture: http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/white-light-defence-ministry-Russia/photo//091210/...

ABC link: http://news.yahoo.com/video/world-15749633/17075748

Montana: 11º and weak sun in downtown Missoula at noon.

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