for Gabriel
Why brook’st thou, ignorant horse, subjection?
Why dost thou, bull and boar, so seelily
Dissemble weakness, and by one man’s stroke die,
Whose whole kind you might swallow and feed upon?
Donne
Seely or silly?
Timorous beasts
Thwacked and buffeted into pens
Clamour against the world, although
The hands they suffer at are men’s.
Terror masters them – it protests,
Seems to resist, then lets them go
Lambs to the slaughter, pigs, cows…
Men who stand and look on equate
Value with fleshly substance – price
The measure of it; and this they state
By way of nods and puckering brows.
Yet the whole place seems paradise
To one of them, who does not count
Or bid, through whom a passion stares
And feeds on what he cannot grasp:
Each penned or passing creature wears,
For him, an auric splendour, faint
But clear and there. His fingers clasp
A hand above him, trembling at
The power a solicitous father bends
To shield him from. But through the boy’s
Passion – uncertain where it tends,
What it might mean – the man has caught
Something of brilliance, so that he toys
With likenesses, which grope and guess
At meaning: through such wintry light
As lingers in the frosted breath
Looping these mindless skulls, one might
(He fancies) look on blessedness.
What moves him, though, beyond all myth,
Is what the bidders, were they to break
Silence, might judge beneath contempt –
The vacant, dumb docility
With which most other lives are stamped.
This powerlessness to choose or speak
So fleshes out the verb to be
That children innocent of pain
Take it for glory: which, absurd
To traders who provide for them,
Seems emblem of a fate endured
To those who dream of angels on
The darkened hills of Bethlehem.
Christmas Eve, 1983