Wisdom from a Gnostic Sage
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Sam found a little knife
While wand’ring in the ward.
When nurses tried to truss
The old man to a chair,
He cut their knotted tape
And made good his escape.
But is he strong enough
To grab with steady hand
The starched lapel of Life-
In-Death’s white coat and crash
That cranium’s empty dome?
That way, he might get home.
He Descended into Hell
Phillip Medhurst
My heart goes down to Hell with him,
Though I must shut my eyes
To what he sees. I fear the dark,
But trail with quiet tread
Lest he looks back,
And weakening, lets me cling to him.
For he has work to do within
That senseless void, and I
Must be a hovering thing and hope
That he will see the light
Again, and say
That unmade, made again, is good.
A tree is butchered into beams,
Torn flesh emblematised,
As Jesse’s rod is re-conceived –
Delivered cruciform.
Adorned with jewels, hung with gold,
The ark becomes a rood.
A flotsam of humanity
Drowns in a sea of blood.
Though man-proportioned, Christos shrinks
Into His mother’s robe:
Our God kenotic made.
Fat first-fruits pledge what is to be:
A growing and a ripening sea.
His promise raises us from sleep
To cross, in forty days, the deep.
Phillip Medhurst