Revisited Waters

Part 4

ORIGINS

Spirits united to-day and to-morrow dispersed

To places forgetting one place where the wind and the cloud

Conspired with the waterfall's thunder and found it accursed

If the peak of its bondage was proud:

May you speak with a tongue that learns only from love what it

knows.

May your strength be the strength of wild eagles, and may the

blind shock

Of the elements warring create in you joy and repose.

May you honour the heart of the rock.

For we came out of silence and back into silence return.

We were stripped for the elements' fury; by them we were

dressed.

First they mocked us, but then we grew stronger and mocked

them in turn,

In the heart of the whirlwind found rest.

We took refuge in caves of our daybreak. The flint and the knife

Preserved us from want and from peril. A mountainous sea,

Ice, famine, or battle, predicted the end of all life;

But from horror we shook ourselves free.

As the night of those ages gave birth to a desolate day

We protected our flocks; where the tiger, the wolf and the boar

Besieged our survival, we killed them, and killed birds of prey:

So we nourished our life at death's door.

Yet nothing we knew in that rock of a soul that would climb,

Of a Christ that would save us, contracting all heaven in a span.

Compassion was silent. The reticent forces of rhyme

Lay still on the slumber of man.

What numberless ages of anguish were sifted like sand!

What yearning and ache of the loins, while an offspring of hate

Flung babes to the furnace, until the true veins of the hand

Through the prophets transfigured the state:

Then at last man encountered himself, his Accuser and end.

He saw his own Hell and the labouring lusts that destroy;

And Jerusalem showed him the pastures where friend dies for

friend,

And the end of all labour is joy.