Advent: The music stopped the clocks

What was it, music

but not music, horns

and strings unplayed,

unwound, then replayed

in some ethereal sphere,

barely heard the way

music is head, the ways

voices and choirs

are heard, played and sung

for the heavens,

the heavens themselves

simultaneously conducting

and absorbing into the composition,

creation  transforming the formless

and deep, and we heard the music

through the millennia as it transcended

time, as it transformed time, as time

became superfluous, past, present and

future melding into glory.

Painting: A Choir of Angels by Simon Marmion (1459), National Gallery of Art, London.