A solemn, sombre, leaden Saturday –

the muscles and joints of the day lie slack.

Silence entombed in stillness – dread Sabbath.

Who can be a believer on this day?

I’ve come so far to shed tears here at last

in the city of my heart. No one stirs.

Faith creeps into its own receptacles.

What an absence! Is there life somewhere deep

where death has lain entranced for countless years?

An ancient multitude long forgotten

in the blackest sinews of the cold earth?

Can I find them in the my own recesses

calling for spirit and light and rebirth?

Not I, but only the most human part

of what counts in me as creation

can descend to hell and break its magic.

But still the day’s observance must go on.

What is to observe if God has gone down

to the sightless, the unobserved, the lost,

and clasped them in a permanent embrace?

Ranald Macdonald (1955-2014), (Jay Landar), The Sacred City, 31st March 2013.