Poetry

One Man, Two Hands

The First Hand is first. First-born over all creation,
Throwing up light, framing the sky in a crafty gesture,
Nailing down planets, those colourful stellar balls,
Into an order into a galaxy into space.

Hand Two was made in human likeness.
A Christmas baby, with fingernails and everything! Mal-coordinated
Childish digits needing practice.
In Him all things hold together, but a baby has to be taught to hold!

How did they stretch skin around the Invisible God?
Was it like cling-film?
Why poke a Deity's infinite dimensions inside a fleshy glove?
Such a self-imposed torture.
Such a nonsensical mathematical equation.

It adds up though, full circle.
You see, the First Hand had written the book long ago. Before the creation
Of the world, in a book, the elect were specified:
Me, you, in two thousand and two?

Hand Two concluded the chapter at Easter.
It is finished then.
That was when the work was nailed.

One Hand lets stars trickle through fingers, pouring
Hundreds and Thousands, on gold fairy cake.
It strokes the cosmos as if hair and waves goodbye to the universe.
But up the arms, across the blade, behind the nape, down and up
the other side, and out on a limb — there we have the other hand.
Hand Two.
Sliced into two, betwixt iron and wood.

The old poet has said,
He sat enthroned above the circle of the earth.
And we also know,
He hung entangled on the circle of the tip of a nail.
A compass, full circle.
A wonderful expression made in love on a crude construction doused in blood.

One Man, Two Hands.
Where are they now?
Writing in a divine palace, names in a book.
Palms open are beckoning.

Anon

Thoughts on Job 28

Out of darkness into light And back and out again We are carted swift through burrowed gaps Travelling south by train.

As this machine's pulse — Sheffield and on — Drives out, my mind's own line spins out and back, `round the cracked crags and the grey skies bulked behind.

And beyond — an inside tug, a pull — remembered writing juts into my skittering thought, my window's view of rain and rocks and mill-stream cuts:

`There is a mine for silver, A place for gold, refined' the ancient word-song carves my thoughts and makes the wet world shine.

And the old, hunched land through which we skim — Now Chesterfield, now on — seems held close in the hands of the living God and warmly breathed upon.

He is abroad — strides back and forth, Knows well this hollowed ground. He is walking out in every place, Each hill-perched, wet-brown town.

He looks beyond the falcon's sweep, Thrusts deep his hidden grasp. His sinewed, subtle, wiser mind Threads molten links from Now to Past

Where could my wisdom start without A pause in awe of him who in one pain-mined life dug out fresh gold:

Behold! I do a new thing

Matt Campbell