Poetry Day - Crossings
I thought I would share some stanzas from a poem by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. These are the first, third, sixth and seventh stanzas from a poem of eight. Much of his poetry takes it's subject from things "religious" as described on the back cover, but this one is simply about human relationship.
Picture from here.
Crossings
While I sit mute, suspicious of my choice
(Reserve of fluency), how do I reach
You, then, across the acres of the room?
Yes, all the platitudes are clear enough:
Muteness is eloquence, silence is the stuff
Of sharing, while hands work a busy loom;
But on your flesh my hands will still be blind.
Your face is shut. Your body gives no voice,
But charts a distance. How do we avoid
A treaty with the compromising word?
Knowing that after, when we have destroyed
The ambiguity, the precious surd
Of uncommitted quiet, we shall find
Our honesty still waits to be aligned?
...
Tell me what I am asking, then, what plea
You hear without pronouncing. It is you
Who hold the mirror and who know the name
And will not say it; while the desperate cold
Unchristened infant, years or seconds old,
Tries its new lungs with incoherent blame,
Clench-fisted, begs the necessary clue
That holds the hand of an identity
Its lifelong distance. Absolution’s cheap
This way, as I laboriously forget
The guilt of joint conspirators, asleep
Against complaining noises, bodies set
Waiting for one to learn or one to teach:
Casual midwives for miscarrying speech.
...
And if I told you, should I be surprised
If you, turning your head, asked me, And why?
The choice is mine, the landscape my design,
The black my painting, and the ice my chill;
Looked bitterly at the evasive skill
That locks me up inside this private sign,
Turning a greedy fascinated eye
On an emotion still uncompromised
At its still distance. If I do not tell,
And play under the bedclothes with conceits,
What prudence keeps me in this glassy cell,
The polished atoms of half-willed defeats?
Well, atoms split, my love, are lovers’ death,
Out in the cold, no wind will lend us breath.
To break a lock by giving open tongue,
Stand up, come in and sing us out of doors,
I know stirs recollections in the flesh,
And blows the dust from pictures pushed away.
Collected shadows from another day—
Collected words, packed stinking, tight, unfresh,
Ready to send the shiver down old sores,
Echoes of other bodies, roundly flung
A few year’s distance. And the hoarded tears,
Unheard reproaches, wait to be unlocked.
Meanwhile I thoughtfully deploy my fears,
Afraid to find my facile pities mocked,
Afraid my probing taps the blood again,
That my flesh too clouds over with the stain.
....
Rowan Williams, The Poems of Rowan Williams