Meeting Among the Mountains ~ God needs you to understand ~

Away their purple faces and their gold,

And evening has taken all the bees from the thyme,

And all the scent is shed away by the cold.

Against the hard and pale blue evening sky

The mountain’s new-dropped summer snow is clear

Glistening in steadfast stillness: like transcendent

Clean pain sending on us a chill down here.

Christ on the Cross! — his beautiful young man’s body

Has fallen dead upon the nails, and hangs

White and loose at last, with all the pain

Drawn on his mouth, eyes broken at last by his pangs.

And slowly down the mountain road, belated,

A bullock wagon comes; so I am ashamed

To gaze any more at the Christ, whom the mountain snows

Whitely confront; I wait on the grass, am lamed.

The breath of the bullock stains the hard, chill air,

The band is across its brow, and it scarcely seems

To draw the load, so still and slow it moves,

While the driver on the shaft sits crouched in dreams.

Surely about his sunburnt face is something

That vexes me with wonder.

He sits so still

Here among all this silence, crouching forward,

Dreaming and letting the bullock take its will.

I stand aside on the grass to let them go;

And Christ, I have met his accusing eyes again,

The brown eyes black with misery and hate, that look

Full in my own, and the torment starts again.

One moment the hate leaps at me standing there,

One moment I see the stillness of agony,

Something frozen the silence that dare not be

Loosed, one moment the darkness frightens me.

Then among the averted pansies, beneath the high

White peaks of snow, at the foot of the sunken Christ,

I stand in a chill of anguish, trying to say

The joy I bought was not too highly-priced.

But he has gone, motionless, hating me,

Living as the mountains do, because they are strong,

With a pale, dead Christ on the crucifix of his heart,

And breathing the frozen memory of his wrong.

Still in his nostrils the frozen breath of despair,

And heart like a cross that bears dead agony

Of naked love, clenched in his fists the shame,

And in his belly the smouldering hate of me.

And I, as I stand in the cold, averted flowers, Feel the shame-wounds in his hands pierce through my own,

And breathe despair that turns my lungs to stone

And know the dead Christ weighing on my bone. ~

Meeting Among the Mountains –

Amen 😔😔😔😔😔