Collection 8: Sonnets

Collection 8: Sonnets

Meditation on the body of Christ, Bearing the Image, Michelangelo, Dark Lady, Cross Purposes

Meditation on the body of Christ

Lord, at your feet I fall, that holy place

where lepers and harlots lie, and parents plead

life for a dying child; so, grasping grace,

I touch your wounded feet, and tell my need.

Your arms reach out to hold my grief and shame,

to lift me up, to heal and set me free;

Your broken hands roll back the stone of blame

to bring new life, and now take hold of me.

But how shall I look up into your face,

Your eyes consuming with their unmade light?

For love unbounded burns me with your gaze

And I must die to find life in your sight.

Your feet, your hands, your shining face, these three

Are mercy, power and endless love to me.

Bearing the image

Still without memory, still unaware

Of any possibility of future, there

Sprawls Adam in his golden thoughtlessness

Upon the green of Eden, where he is

Contemplated. While he continues whole

Completeness only incompletes his role.

The cut is deep. A trail of scarlet blood

Leads to where Eve too slumbers upon sward.

Adam’s wound will close, hers will remain.

New life is only birthed in blood and pain.

She dreams of a thorned and weaponed future where

A cross awaits the offspring she will bear

And now the image opens in her eyes 

Of Love most fully given when it dies.

Michelangelo

Naked and unashamed in broadest day,

Unmoved, unmoving, you can never share

Our thrilled bemusement at your standing there.

You grant our wish, and equally betray –

Muscles unmoving, lips that cannot say,

Brittle eternity of marble hair,

Proportionate perfection! Yet you are

Of stone, not flesh, in flight from our decay.

You look down with a mute I told you so,

Rebuke the perfect place where we would go

With all the flesh’s longing to be fair:

For in his marble, Michelangelo,

If he had missed the giant prisoned there,

Had shaped no form to shelter his despair.

Dark Lady

Is that you, peering out between the lines,

The fourteen bars he conjured for your cage?

He lured you where eternal summer shines

And promised you’d be free from mortal rage.

We know a bit – he swears that you are fair –

Your lips, your breasts, the black wires on your head –

He says how much he loves your voice, but where

Does he record a single word you said?

So did he break your bondage to decay?

We neither see nor hear you. He’s to blame.

One word our greatest wordsmith didn’t say,

He hasn’t even let us know your name.

What strangely lifeless immortality.

Where is a living word to speak for me?

Cross Purposes

    One

The best I have to bring you is my worst.

To heal me you hold all my fear and pain.

To bless me you have made yourself accursed.

You bear my death that I may breathe again.

So here I am, no stranger in this crowd

Pressing against you with their cries of hate.

Their jeers and insults only voice aloud

The sullen silence of my inner state.

How can I do this to you? How heap more

And yet more horror on your helplessness?

How watch you facing down this furious roar,

These people scandalised by holiness?

So I must give you all, or not be free.

You gladly wear my worst, to welcome me.

    Two

The worst that I can bring you is my best.

“How splendidly I keep your rules all day.

I know you cannot fail to be impressed

By my fine speeches every time I pray.”

“ ‘Take up my cross?’ Now that’s a lot to lose.

You’d rank me with this tax collector here,

Whose sins offend us both?” Thus I refuse

To clutch at costly mercy moving near.

Again I hear my voice among the crowd

Whose scorn and anger drown your ardent pleas

For mercy on ignorance. Stiff necked and proud,

I find I’m standing with the Pharisees.

My worst is blessed, best cursed: such is my fall

Nothing can mend me till you have my all.

Cross Purposes is a double sonnet. Though each half is complete as an individual poem, the two can be read together for complementary or contrasting insights, reflecting one another. Some of Shakespeare's sonnet use this form, for example the "Mutability" sonnets numbered 64 and 65.