Understand?
How shall you understand.
Sufficient unto the day, we know.
But in the midst of that shrieked day
What soul can plan the burrowing through
Of all-enfolding night
To come regardless?
Blind worms can eat the dust
They burrow through,
The rocks, the salts,
The sea-swung bones of their environment
And therein find the strength
To carry on; to carry on; to carry on;
To burrow through the night.
They eat the bones, they eat the sorrow,
They turn it into yielding loops
Of opalescent purpose.
Head to tail
Quite dark-refined,
To burrow through the night;
And God-blind man may
Burrow, burrow, burrow
Yet not through
To day
without the Day-spring,
Lord of Light.
See, O see the Lord of Light
And understand,
Love-looking ones,
His quietness of being
Here
With you now;
The spirit of your broken child
Cradled in his arms
Here
With you now.
With you now.
His presence as a sea
Perpetually
Hushes on the weedstrands of your souls
And when the tide leans out
May come your child,
And with a bucket and a spade
Dig deep;
And going leave a hole
Which aches and pleads
That it be filled,
Which can’t be filled.
O child...
But then His tide probes back,
So gently settles round your pain,
Doesn’t it,
Cuddled deep in frothing wavelets
Of his joy;
Soon of His surging laughter.
And the strands are ribbed for ever
By the pulses of His power
As His sucking, chiding, tear-salt sea
Perpetually
Hushes
In that wondrous
Wild-remembered,
Child-dug
Hollow in your hearts.
(April,
1971)
