There Was a Saviour

There was a saviour

Rarer than radium,

Commoner than water, crueler than truth;

Children kept from the sun

Assembled at his tongue

To hear the golden note turn in a groove,

Prisoners of wishes locked their eyes

In the jails and studies of his keyless smiles.

The voice of children says

From a lost wilderness

There was calm to be done in his safe unrest

When hindering man hurt

Man, animal or bird

We hid our fears in the murdering breath,

Silence, silence to do, when the earth grew loud,

In lairs and asylums of the tremendous shout.

There was glory to hear

In the churches of his tears,

Under his downy arm you sighed as he struck,

O you who could not cry

On to the ground when a man died

Put a tear for joy in the unearthly flood

And laid your cheek against a cloud-formed shell:

Now in the dark there is only yourself and myself.

Two proud, blacked brothers cry,

Winter-locked side by side,

To this inhospitable hollow year,

O we could not stir

One lean sigh when we heard

Greed on man beating near and fire neighbour

But wailed and nested in the sky-blue wall

Now break a giant tear for the little known fall.

For the drooping of homes,

That did not nurse our bones,

Brave deaths of only ones but never found,

Now see, alone in us,

Our own true strangers’ dust

Ride through the doors of our unentered house.

Exiled in us we arouse the soft,

Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks.