Advent, a season of memory
A season of hope
A looking backwards
to an old hope fulfilled
Feeds a hopeful looking forward

Memory and hope
A strained set of fellows
As hope looks forward
And memory looks back
So often the two divide

A memory of joy
In the midst of loss
Pushes pain into the future
Hope hides for a season
And for this reason seems to mock

Or a memory of shame
Excavated by accident
At the height of hope’s endeavors
Gives hope a desperate motivation
To blindly move, rebuild, and bury

Hope denying memory
Forsakes the honest maps
Forgets the tangled ways
Runs and trips into the future
New memories made worst than the first

Hope without memory to mix
A shuttered horizon
and grasping in the dark
A journey without destination
A ship without compass or stars

Advent, a season of remembering
A marriage of hope and memory
Hope recalling a hope fulfilled
Memory feeding imagination
The future brightly bursting forward


The rest of the poems from Rusten Harris’s Advent series on Moss Kingdom:
IncarnationChristmas EveKingsSome Kind of GloryChainsGiftsQuotidian CoupleA Thousand LightsEve & MaryTreasured UpChristmasWinter StavesThe GloriasCherubimJosephStrange RedeemerWombMagiTemple TroughAdventLord’s DayFar as the Curse is FoundJubileeThe Massacre of the InnocentsLiturgical Time

Other Advent poems on Moss Kingdom:

December 21: an Advent poem for the Winter SolsticeOf Edmund and AslanTiptoe HopeThe Second Coming by William Butler Yeats