Читать книгу Cardos y lluvia - Kate Clanchy - Страница 21

The implicated generations made

This symbol of their lives, a stone made light

By what is carved on it. The plaiting masks,

But not with involutions of shade,

What a stone says and what a stone cross asks.

Something that is not mirrored by nor trapped

In webs of water or bag-nets of cloud;

The tangled mesh of weed lets it go by.

Only men’s minds could ever have unmapped

Into abstraction such territory.

No green bay going yellow over sand

In written on by winds to tell a tale

Of death-dishevelled gull or heron, stiff

As a cruel clerk with gaunt writs in his hand

–Or even of light, that makes its depths a cliff.

Singing responses order otherwise.

The tangled generations ravelled out

In links of song whose sweet strong choruses

Are these stone involutions to the eyes

Given to the ear in abstract vocables.

The stone remains, and the cross, to let us know

Their unjust, hard demands, as symbols do.

But on them twine and grow beneath the dove

Serpents of wisdom whose cool statements show

Such understanding that it seems like love.