Resurrection: Borgo San Sepolcro - Rowan Williams

To celebrate Pentecost, here is another of Williams' poems. This one reflects on Piero della Francesca's fifteenth century depiction of the resurrection:

 According to Ben Myers, Aldous Huxley called this the greatest picture in the world. I think that this is the greatest reflection on the resurrection I have ever read:

Today it is time. Warm enough, finally,

to ease the lids apart, the wax lips of a breaking bud

defeated by the steady push, hour after hour,

opening to show wet and dark, a tongue exploring,

an eye shrinking against the dawn. Light

like a fishing line draws its catch straight up,

then slackens for a second. The flat foot drops,

the shoulders sag. Here is the world again, well-known,

the dawn greeted in snoring dreams of a familiar

winter everyone prefers. So the black eyes

fixed half-open, start to search, ravenous,

imperative, they look for pits, for hollows where

their flood can be decanted, look

for rooms ready for commandeering, ready

to be defeated by the push, the green implacable 

rising. So he pauses, gathering the strength 

in his flat foot, as the perspective buckles under him,

and the dreamers lean dangerously inwards. Contained,

exhausted, hungry, death running off his limbs like drops

from a shower, gathering himself. We wait, 

paralysed as if in dreams, for his spring.

I have been defeated by the push, the green implacable rising: praise God!
Rowan Williams Headwaters can be ordered from Harvest Bookshop (and elsewhere!)  here.