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Advent Poetry - BC:AD

 Ooops... Just realised that although I had uploaded this poem to YouTube, and posted that via social media, due to the craziness of yesterday's diary I didn't put the link here, and so when I went to upload today's poem this one had an even more pitifully small number of views than normal. 

One of my tasks yesterday was prerecording the Circuit "Last Light" Service for the 31st December (is it any wonder I don't know what day it is?) and as part of that I note that time is an arbitrary (and indeed as Einstein demonstrated, relative) concept  and that people use different yardsticks to mark different aspects of it out.

But for a around 1600 years the world has increasingly used the birth of Christ to mark out the pivot point between two historic era's, even though this is a frustratingly difficult point in time to pin down, even to a year never mind a time of year... given the events of this "Christmas" I'm all for celebrating again on one of the many alternative dates posited by people with too much time on their hands, in March or June.

Anyway, this is a poem by U.A. Fanthorpe, a poet that I am not terribly familiar with, but in this poem she plays with this idea of 0 AD - the time when nothing happens, except for the most important event in history in Christian eyes. Of course she uses the "old" terminology of AD (Anno Domini - the Year of the Lord) rather than CE (Common Era) that we were taught in college, long before the PC (Politically Correct) era. Fanthorpe was writing even further back than that however, so like much else let us judge her writing in the light of her time (if we have to judge it at all...)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the first of what will now be two postings today...



Selah


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