Sculpted

 Sculpted

Like the present absence of a shadow, 

Or a trace fossil shaped by its loss

I see you as I see myself-

As nothing more than what we are not. 

We rust and we rot and we watch it all-

From the tar-dipped smile to the tarnished soul.

Yet we are maligned 

When we are wrongly defined 

By each decaying day.

It’s true I’ve lost something. 

But so has a sculpture. 

And I forget that I, too, though unfinished, 

Am chiseled and changed. 

Fissured, yes, and already chipped. 

Yet I am not what I was or what I will be. 

Why then do I see in me and around me 

The cliffs of coarsened rock, 

Weather-whitled, bone-cracked by waves and

Scarred by slowly shifting seas?

This, too, is stone to be sculpted. 

We are not what we were, 

Or what we could be. 

And yet we could still unearth 

What we were before birth;

The image in the Sculptor’s eyes. 

Where?

Where?

“I do not know where they’ve laid him.’

Though incense sweetens the stench, the air is still sick.  

Cassocks of white walk between

The boxes without being, row on row. 

All the while, the soldiers watch.

Wearing grief like gauze 

As they wait for the makeshift mourning to end. 

And then they load them, this cargo of caskets. 

Ceaselessly, they are taken to be dropped

In plots of plundered soil. 

There, they lie unmarked in peaceless parks.

No crosses guard their graves. 

We pick at old wounds, 

And plague pits reopen. 

The ground scabs

But soon it will scar. 

Were there no graves in Egypt,

No plague pits in the past

That you led us here, my God?

Were the church bells too quiet for you

When, even yesterday, before all this, 

We laid our friends to rest in land already laden with decay?

Did you do nothing as we wandered this way?

Not every question has an answer, but some do. 

“Where have you laid him?”

She cried, as He had cried

Beside another’s grave.

Emmanuel, God with us, 

God with us beside the grave and in it. 

“He is not here, He has risen."

The Ressurection, Cookham by Sir Stanley Spencer

Point us to the sky

Soundless and crowdless, 

Our cityless streets are stripped of themselves.

Spires and steeples, though silent, still needle the sky, 

While confetti, breeze-beaten,

Falls from cherry trees in empty churchyards. 

Above us, and around us, only sky. 

Sun-bleached and latticed with clouds,

That sky, alone, is untainted, 

Untouched by our two-metre cells. 

Somehow, that sky is more stable,

And purer than ever before.

Purer, except for that one night when, 

Falling from that same sky, the angels spoke of Hope, 

A Hope that was one of us, 

A Hope that could live with the dying and dead. 

And yet, his storm-stilling hands stretched out to the tar-coated sky, 

That same Hope, while dying, cried out: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?

My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?

But three days of skyless death could not hold him in, 

And Hope, unburied, rose up to the sky.

My God, have you forsaken us?

Lord, amidst the shadows of these soulless streets

Point us to the sky.