THROUGH A STAINED GLASS DARKLY

 

 

str.                               Give or take a maker,

                                    there must be a Creation.

                        None but a universal pattern

                                    need leave nothing out,

                                    and leaving nothing out,

                                    will make the right shape happen.

                        But only a god could know it all,

                        get it right, and live forever.

 

                        We know in part after the curse,

                        said the partial saint whose mid-life call

                        came as a revelation.  Or –

                        we get a sporting chance to breathe

                        a molecule that Jesus breathed,

                                    a chance to know it – never.

                        And have I said that the universe

                        and all the art of it must falter

            on that day when days there are no more?

 

ant.                              Come out and dance with me;

                                    the small can make you free.

                        Like those who marvell in a garden,

                                    for one burial burn,

                                    safe in the well-wrought urn.

                                    The great require our pardon

                        for some faults, yet their music lives,

                        and so do all who join the song.

 

                        Rapt in their bond, the mother and child

                        and Mary, their painter, survive their lives.

                        The Black Knight warred against the dark,

                        “After our death that live may we,

                        Timor mortis conturbat me.”

                                    Handprints on the walls

                        of caves across the world: the wild

                        first women piped paint at the hand that gives,

            nor knew of the others who left that self-same mark

 

ep.                               on every unimagined continent.