| An Hour in Chapel Annexe What are we to believe? That Christ welcomed the thorns, Sebastian the arrows, Catherine the wheel? Yes, they tell us. Only when the body’s shriven, mortified, made carcass and dispatched can the soul emerge immaculate and rise like gas, invisible yet palpable. Pain is the passport to Jerusalem. Christ hangs on above my head, his face cast down, his arms stripped wings spread wide, his ankles crossed. This is more dance than agony, a frozen entrechat – Christ terpsichore, reeling down the ages to a timeless tune, treading out the double loop, the bee’s infinity, until the measure’s known by all. And what’s a dance? A means by which we occupy the air, divert, persuade, seduce. Passionate engagement, yet powerless to lift the curse of Sisyphus, or block the juggernaut, or move the stone. This God omnipotent, who claims our praise and swallows our prayers like a hungry bird, is from dreamtime. He draws on the oxygen of our need. We might well worship water falling, metamorphic clouds, the janus faces watching from the cliffs that tell us what we want to know. Dick Jones |
If you have any comments on this poem, Dick Jones would be
pleased to hear them.
