An essay concerning religion by John Burnside

I   God Bless

Allergic to salt,
or language,
                        they sit out the conflict
in angles that barely
exist,
                                                mathematical
functions,
expressed as the pity we
feel
for the lost in our children:

leftovers; chess pieces;
undershirts hanging to dry

in misted bathrooms.

On winter nights, they come
in from the dark

to lamplight
                    and the yellow aftermath

of aniseed and cow-gum:
                                               windswept, untouched,
but meshed, one with another,

a history
of silk

          and listening,
                                    not quite
pity, after all,

but how we manage love
on laundry days:

T-shirts and gym shoes,
                                                flowers of grease on a tie,

the facts we would need, to recover, in any event,

the shape of foreboding,
the caught breath
of all shall be well

 II    Promises to keep

                               — and all manner of thing
shall be well

parcels of citrus
left on a doorstep, in snow,

and sleep a kind of fur,
                                            a darkening pelt
of purest animal,
                                the warmth from which we rise
as if we were remembering a   prayer
 we used to say in school
                                                some unexpected
benediction, locked in song or Latin. 

They say, at the end of the world, desire is a story
where everything mimics itself, like a map, or a quote,

till dawn is the thought of dawn
on the road to the hills

and snow, the continuing sleep
of a paraphrased child:

that song about going home not quite complete
and always on the point of giving out:

a vanishing into itself, as the last of the snow
is part of its own disappearance: bird-tracks and footprints

finding the path to the woods, in the coming and going
that learns how far the whole repeats itself
time and again, in what it leaves to chance,

the all shall be well of details and glaring mistakes, 
the warmth for no reason; the light at the back of the mind.

III    Nessun dorma

No one could sleep
when the kitchen was full of signs

and wonders:
                    when the good book in the ceiling
bled through the lath and plaster, those antiqued

pages of fool’s gold and vellum 
calling through Newsnight and Friends
in many tongues;

no one could be at peace
in this home from home, 

when a headlamp stroking a wall
was The Second Coming.

Think of it: end of days;
no rapture, just this grass-light at the window,

a jug on a table, the unfinished curve of an egg,
some accidental spill of salt, or berries,

and yet, while we lay awake

in the absence of scripture,
a prophet was arriving through the crowd, all mouth and trousers,

nobody we would know, though he stood with the chosen
and barked, like a dog in the wind, to his All-Seeing God.

IV    Flying over the Bible belt

From a distance, we see the shapes they never see,
the crosses in the dark, the flumes of amber,
animal colours, pooling in ditches in hollows,

and though they are mostly ourselves in other forms,
checking the doors and windows, drawing the curtains,
taped to the blue of the air in their tidy kitchens,

the heaven we imagine from above
is truer than their painted afterlife:
no choirs or wings for us, no future tense,

only a run of silver through the woods
or, at the rim of what we see as ocean,
intricate circles of flame, where the first of the watchers

cradles the wind in his hands
and bows down for now.

V    Shrine

In the country we learned in childhood
from prayer books and early commercials,

the dead and the dying are going about their business:
filling a basin of water, to trap the heat,

raking the fishpools, or pausing to tip their heads
to a puzzling sky.

Somewhere a wall is made for lamentation
and, somewhere else, a furnace in the woods;

but, here, the spirits come and go all day
in perpetual summer:

women in scarves, with umbrellas and sensible shoes,
boys from the stockyard, coddled in milk and tallow;

here, the dead have nothing to remember,
they wander off to light and vacancy

while we continue, shadowed, inexact,
our faces so like theirs we sometimes

stop, mid-sentence, thinking of ourselves
as lost already, gaslight in our hair,

a brute finality to every gesture;
and this is where eternity begins

a further presence, sifted from the air
as must, or chalk;

delusion, too: the personal; the local;
delicate fingers snagging in a web

of nerve and dream: first sleep, then seraphim;
the altars set with barley-cup and candles,

the voice on the radio calling the faithful to tea
in kitchenettes
                                and whited sculleries

where, day by day, a new god comes to light,
naked, amnesiac, bestial, almost human.

http://www.saltpublishing.com/saltmagazine/issues/01/text/Burnside_John.htm