Magna Karistia

Magna Karistia

Magna Karistia

Lord, your work is now reversed.
No cockcrows spit the bloody dawn
Wheat whispers like fields of glittering wasps
The fruits of orchards hang down
Fat and untested . . . we crumble to the dust
From which we were once born.

How can all this dying bring redemption?
How will you burn us into angels
With skin of gold of the light of sun
From blackened bodies dumped in wells?
Forgive my doubts of heaven
Amid the sweet miasma of this hell.

Who will survive to shoot memories
From age to age like swallows
Joining distant countries?
Who will preserve fire, earth, snow
The first green shivering of trees
The flow of pilgrims to the Barrow?

The reason that you made us –
Surely – was to witness your creation?
Without us what will be your purpose
As you walk around your garden
In eardrum-silence, echoes
Of the hooves of Death spreading on

And on – each night my sleep is beating
Over what my being has amounted to
Beyond cold vigils, chanting
The isolation of beatitude
Always giving thanks and never doubting
Why so much of it was due. 

I gave my youth to find your paradise
Within this cell and cloister
Now every little sacrifice
Flares and rages – has stripped me to a pair
Of jittery fiery eyes
Skidding off corpses everywhere.

Lord, for years I have been dying
Leeched white by sterile days,
Lacklustre nights; instead of trying
To exorcise the haze
Of tepid piety – instead of crying
Out for grace, I mouthed your praise

While desperate to feel your fire in me,
Yet dreaded it, resisted till the kiss
Of apathy
Or warm embrace of fickleness
Would welcome my return to the
Familiar chapel of my emptiness.

You could have driven me pure
Transfigured me with light – one vision
Just one! would have made me sure
This life of yours was really mine.
Each day, like a dog, I waited for
Your unmistakeable sign

And now it comes – as flaming blood
Distilling fear to keener fear
And no escape; no ark bobs on the flood
Of this fetid waveless atmosphere –
The dark age has come – God
Deliver me, prepare 

My soul . . . the world’s light darkens,
The future tunnels to the past.
This blank paper is my afterlife, a token
Of the hope I’ve lost.
Lord start again. Make the earth
Afresh from this
                                 Great Dearth.