Earth cannot, with all its trinkets’ Slake my longings at this hour; They were captured, they were widened, When my Jesus showed his power. None but he can now content me, He, the Incomprehensible; O to gaze upon his Person, God in man made visible. Ann Griffiths...
Across my foundering deck shone A beacon, an eternal; beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This jack, poor potsherd,...
…. I bet my life on beauty, truth, And love! Not abstract, but incarnate truth; Not beauty’s passing shadow, but its self, Its very self made flesh – love realized. I bet my life on Christ, Christ crucified. Behold your God! My soul cries out. He hangs, Serenely...
And, sitting down, they watched him there, The soldiers did; There, while they played with dice, And, sitting down, they watched him there, The soldiers did; There, while they played with dice, He made his sacrifice, And died upon the cross to rid God’s world of sin....
Make no mistake If he rose at all It was as his body; If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse’ The molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the church will fall. It was not the flowers, Each soft Spring recurrent; It was not as his spirit in the mouths and...
Squeezed between Good Friday and Easter, Ignored by preachers and painters and poets, Saturday lies cold and dark and silent – An unbearable pause between death and life. There are many Saturday people To whom Easter does not come.
‘He’s gone,’ says Joseph, and, with Pilate’s leave Eases the nails and lowers him from the Tree’ Wraps him in reverent and tender thoughts And lays him in the cave called Memory. That cave is deeply hewn in Joseph’s heart: All that’s within will always be his own:...
Love that gives, gives ever more, gives with zeal, with eager hands, spares not, keeps not, all outpours, ventures all its all expends. . Drained is love in making full, bound in setting others free, poor in making many rich, weak in giving power to be. . Therefore he...
Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life: Such a Way, as gives us breath: Such a truth, as ends all strife: Such a Life as killeth death. Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength: Such a Light, as shows a feast: Such a Feast, as mends in length: Such a Strength, as makes his...
I was fed up with God. He wasn’t there Or had forgotten me, or did not care, Left me alone To struggle hopelessly ‘gainst odds too great for me – my heart was stone. And young people talked about him far too much, Young people, who were strong, and should be gay....
Christ is the language in which we speak to God And also God, so that we speak in truth; He in us, we in him, speaking To one another, to him, the City of God. H. Sisson (1914-2003), The Usk, 1973.
Christmas Eve! Five Hundred poets waited, pen Poised above paper, for the poem to arrive, bells ringing. It was because The chimney was too small, because they had ceased to believe, the poem had passed them by on its way out into oblivion, leaving the doorstep bare...