‘I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else’
Dr Johnson
Down on your knees in the street as if a goldsmith
pouncing the metal, you still alarm us,
for all that your yard-and-a-bit of bones are buried.
I remember a student calling your ‘Song to David’
a berserk thing, and though he was wrong
the fling of a raw, unkenneled heart had caught him,
as it could many. You found the trace of its music
when stashed and barred for exhibition
in your century’s nightmare, the foetid warren of Bedlam,
and rejoiced, though God knows how, at seeing the Lamb,
all radiant victim and focal creature,
where knave and fool and we the bewildered are welcomed.
So I too would be glad to pray, if you came
to this other world, where the mettlesome stars
patch the darkness after a different fashion
of the thing we call the cosmos, meaning always
something beautiful, something entire:
glad to be taught by someone unguarded, the lilt
of jubilation practised at every hour,
and the coarse roads conceived as channels
of grace, that naked investment of love. So come,
for a season at least, to a country of goshawk and ibis,
where the diamondbird flickers in tilted leaves
and the needletail swift feeds and drinks on the wing,
where reindeer moss, and sea tassel, and fireweed
come out with archaic flair, and leopard
and tiger and waxlip are so many orchids, and heal-all
and hound’s-tongue and bulrush and running postman
are out for show with the black swans,
the crimson rosellas, the wedge-tailed eagles, and the swallows:
come down, little man, in your dirty linen, and your need
for help back from the alehouse, and your love
of the one whose beauty sent you to sea for pearls.
