OK - and a religious poem from me - this the final part from a sequence
called A Requiem, which Douglas years ago put up in his ezine Lynx, in which
I was imagining Gethsemane -
Best
A
Communion
I show you a new world, risen,
Stubborn with beauty, out of the heartıs need.
Taliesen 1952, RS Thomas
My flesh is sad with itself, it walks in the garden
heavy and opaque, an insoluble riddle.
The bruises on my arms are lightening
and a dew softens my mouth
as birds wink in and out of the trees.
But still I am sad.
The oranges are pale moons. The wind
sings them into eclipse and calls them
back from the black leaves.
I envy their voicelessness, the sweet
fertility that falls
mindlessly to the grass.
I am not gentle tonight.
Tonight my calling is useless,
foreknown and foresuffered. If my face
chills in its blood, if my eyes startle open,
it is because all this sobbing will fall
to inhuman water.
They will say they are redeemed.
They will crown my absence with their suffering.
But I remember a crowded table
and a plate heaped with oranges
and how generous hands reached out and tore
open the common flesh.
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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