wordsout by godfrey rust
The
sailing of the ark < 34
of 45 >
34
These
poems should have been about the cross,
but who could do that? We, who wait here
in
its
long shadow, trying to look up
and unable, knowing that to gaze directly at it
will
burn
out the pupils of our self-esteem? It is not
finished: that face (R S Thomas said it) is "staring
as
over
twenty centuries it has stared,
from unfathomable darkness into unfathomable light",
while
we
between both look on, helpless
like children in Dickens, bewildered heirs
to
some
great estate, watching
the tragic tale unfold, knowing
our
future joy depends on this transaction
in whose genesis we are somehow implicated.
“staring as over twenty centuries...” From R S Thomas’ sequence “Crucifixion” from the book Counterpoint.
children in Dickens I was thinking specifically of the “wards in Jarndyce” in Bleak House.
.