George Barker's Elegy V ...

I

These errors loved no less than the saint loves arrows

Repeat, Love has left the world. He is not here.

O God, like Love, revealing yourself in absence

So that, though farther than stars, like Love that sorrows

In separation, the desire in the heart of hearts

To come home to you makes you most manifest.

The booming zero spins as his halo where

Ashes of pride on all the tongues of sense

Crown us with negatives. O deal us in our deserts

The crumb of falling vanity. It is eucharist.

II

Everyone walking everywhere goes in a glow

Of geometrical progression, all meteors, in praise:

Hosannas on the tongues of the dumb shall raise

Roads for the gangs in chains to return to

God. They go hugging the traumas like alleluias

To the bodies that earn this beatitude. The Seven

Seas they crowd like the great sailing clippers,

Those homing migrants that, with their swallow-like sails set,

Swayed forward along the loneliness that opposed,

For nothing more than a meeting in heaven.

III

Therefore all things, in all three tenses,

Alone like the statue in an alcove of love,

Moving in obedient machinery, sleeping

Happy in impossible achievements, keeping

Close to each other, because the night is dark;

The great man dreaming on the stones of circumstances,

The small wringing hands because rocks will not move;

The beast in its red kingdom, the star in its arc:

O all things, therefore, in shapes or in senses,

Know that they exist in the kiss of his Love.

IV

Incubus. Anaesthetist with glory in a bag,

Foreman with a sweatbox and a whip. Asphyxiator

Of the ecstatic. Sergeant with a grudge

Against the lost lovers in the park of creation,

Fiend behind the fiend behind the fiend behind the

Friend. Mastodon with mastery, monster with an ache

At the tooth of the ego, the dead drunk judge:

Wheresoever Thou art our agony will find Thee

Enthroned on the darkest altar of our heartbreak

Perfect. Beast, brute, bastard. O dog my God!