Reading Gwendolyn MacEwen’s T. E. Lawrence poems

When I was a child, my great-grandmother’s Lives of the Saints

rested on a high shelf, dusty, mouldered, back cover missing.

It meant: the past is a foreign city.

The book said that a particular saint “gave away

the world,” as though the world could be given and got, a jewel

tossed under the passing feet of Christ. I did not know

the world could be given. A sudden flight

from a motorcycle, an arc to rival the sky,

the unexpected sound of broken bones.

Martyrs, willing to exist as an idea—

the word and not the flesh. A woman is writing in a room:

words are a line that bleed her dry, and he, overdrawn hero, also bleeds

her, and bleeds himself, his breath stopped by

the cold rain, a roaring heaven, a quick turn of the road.

Giving the world away, they did not ask or know

if kindness or goodness would come of it.

Is that the life of a saint? A perfection of abdication, giving

away ordinary sweetness for a truth, which gives

without knowing purpose or end. The gamblers of the world,

that woman, that man, daring to believe that

the body falls in perfect grace, redeemed,

the risk worth taking:

if one must die for something,

there’s nothing like a cross

from which to contemplate the world.