Collection 5: Coming to the Cross

 Coming to the Cross

• Always, Remembrance, Silence, Pearl beyond price, The Conspiracy

Always

Always this fading, always this flowering

The night failing, the dawn fleeing

The winter keening for the coming spring

Always this fleeting, always this falling

The seed hungering for the harvest and

The harvest felled that other lives may grow

Always this ailing, always this healing

The breathing in and the breath let go

Stripped out and given to the wild airs

Always this breaking, always this birthing

Behind us birth is gasping, grave gaping

Ahead to feed the all-corroding soil

Till at this crux, where North, South, East and West

Converge in nails upon the embodied All

A death is died that is the death of death

And at His tomb a breath is breathed that

Spits out stone and Life Himself steps out 

To walk all ways with us and Spring is 

Always

Remembrance

So from your high cross did you see afar

in the armour, swords,  the boots and horses,

the tramp of armies off to another war

the flags of battles and the hills of corpses?

So did you hear among our taunts and sneers

The echoing centuries of rage and hate?

the weeping lovers and the mothers' fears,

The curses hurled, the ever hardened heart?

And when they gave you bitter vinegar

could you taste upon parched lips the sting

of pain? the mad, the violated, those who  bear

sorrows drowned by the victors' idiot song?

Finally, when they bashed an iron nail 

into each hand, and in your side a spear

aimed for your life, could your heart still feel

Compassion for the ones who slew you there?

An athlete’s sweat, a mother’s pain, are wounds

Of love: nothing lives without a sacrifice.

Not the bite of nails, it is love that binds

Your broken body to this killing place.

Silence

Silence is a kind of torture. The nicest child

Would sooner be naughty than ignored.

He who speaks hearing into the ears of the deaf

Is silent now before his interrogators

And the importunate impotence of their kingdom.

Silence too upon this bare spiked hill.

The sudden-hushed Babel of the universe

Wears black for its quiet and wasted king,

For shame at loud men. It is for thieves to rail;

He seems to have no business but to suffer.

And God is silent as the sun goes blank

And a veil moves slowly over the heavens.

No-one contradicts these bureaucrats and butchers

As they congratulate themselves upon this killing.

The silence bites into his soul. "My God, my God" -

Now these loud shouts. Now it is our turn

To stare dumbfounded at the power of

This crushed body and hoarse thirsty voice -

Which tears graves open, ripping like a curtain

The tortured silence forcing God from men.

Pearl beyond price

O merchant, merchant, don't buy love.

Your wealth will be utterly scorned.

There was shouting, I remember,

jeers, curses, hoarse cries of pain

and someone quietly weeping.

There was trampling, hooves and boots,

great wooden stakes thrust into mud

and a spear thrust into softness.

There was something streaming softly down,

given to the mire around me

and there was a terrible darkness.

They say that pearls are born of injuries.

I was born of His tears.

I wanted to be the salt globe of His grief,

souring the earth with bitterness,

but He would not. They were tears of love.

I am heavy, lustrous with heaven's light.

O merchant, merchant, sell your trash,

Give all you have and are.

They say that those who seek fine pearls 

must dive far beyond light and air

where bloody froth can boil your brain to bursting

where death swims streamlined round you

and there, where freezing weeds clutch every limb

His ardent heart drives him.

He sifts and searches through the clinging mud -

He touched bottom all right

in that darkness and the spattered mire.

Many waters cannot quench love

neither can floods drown it

for love is stronger than death.

O merchant, merchant, can't you see?

Your mire blinds you. You are His pearl.

Let Him carry you up to the sun.

The Conspiracy

It seemed we were cornered, a cosmic conspiracy,

Our life and our longing aligned against us

With the dread of death, our desire for justice

And the friend who forgives, forgives all

Though understanding everything, each other’s tearing,

Our mood and our might mocked by our ending.

“We did not beg birth, bawling at heaven,

Nor the debt we bear, desire buying

Fractured fulfilment, and at last futility.

We are numb in our need, knowing it unmet

And to ache forever. Oh that you had made us

As the unperceiving stones, unfeeling sea,

The semblance in the stars of far, freezing serenity.”

Thus we acted the innocent.

    Until the ringleader

(As we dared say) defected to our side,

Assumed mortality like man that is made.

He sustained the weary, stole the sting

From grief’s wounds with a gentle word.

Peace and healing were his practice,

Rage too at wrong that wrecks us.

Vain and unvalued was our virtuous posture,

Our Babel laid bare to his brightness.

Wan then the welcome to light that enlightens.

We cursed him and crushed him, hurried him to his cross,

There taught him tortures unimagined by innocence.

Yet he pleaded for our pardon in his fierce passion.

Warring on our wickedness, he dragged it to death,

Laid it in the lees of hell at his release.

Yet his death was reckoned as writing off our debt:

We cannot claim clean hands, pure hearts,

Except by the sign of our sin against Christ.

To baulk at his blood is guilt against us.

Insisting on innocence implicates in his murder…

Rightly could he laugh at our lacrimae rerum.

Our pose is proven, we are found out.

Yet he considers the chief hurt of his cross:

Forsaken. He would spare us confusion…