There was a Saviour

There was a saviour / Rarer than radium, / Commoner than water, crueller than truth; / Children kept from the sun / Assembled at his tongue / To hear the golden note turn in a groove, / Prisoners of wishes locked their eyes / In the jails and studies of his keyless smiles. // The voice of children says / From a lost wilderness / There was calm to be done in his safe unrest, / When hindering man hurt / Man, animal, or bird / We hid our fears in that murdering breath, / Silence, silence to do, when earth grew loud, / In lairs and asylums of the tremendous shout. // There was glory to hear / In the churches of his tears, / Under his downy arm you sighed as he struck, / O you who could not cry / On to the ground when a man died / Put a tear for joy in the unearthly flood / And laid your cheek against a cloud-formed shell: / Now in the dark there is only yourself and myself. // Two proud, blacked brothers cry, / Winter-locked side by side, / To this inhospitable hollow year, / O we who could not stir / One lean sigh when we heard / Greed on man beating near and fire neighbour / But wailed and nested in the sky-blue wall / Now break a giant tear for the little known fall, // For the drooping of homes / That did not nurse our bones, / Brave deaths of only ones but never found, / Now see, alone in us, / Our own true strangers’ dust / Ride through the doors of our unentered house. / Exiled in us we arouse the soft, / Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks.