I am a nothing ornament

Before the enormity of things

Beside that great pity Jesus Christ supplied

Riposte and utter counter to us self-owned slaves

Unmastered selves who muster a full courage

On vanities to jolly, do ourselves true damage

He came: he conquered

I nothing ornament; a presence God created

An ear of corn amongst a prairie's rolling folds

The sparkling stars our avatars of exclamation

Despite men's jars and wars observe nightly libations

The pang in being here, immediate, jinking through

The here; the now; extension, moment. causeless motion

Ungraspable this hard-fact coup de gras sensation

Dispersed like epic verses through a circled firmament

Pastoral, elegiac, meditation, rhapsody

Of radii impossible to all extents

Of sentience inadmissible but by common consent

The vast conspectus of all things commands,

Assent approves it

Pronounces God's infinitudes in laude gloria

And tests, in wrests, invention; my forced fingers rude

Try blessed, astonished, grand, extravagant, epode

In testimonial ink

May you my friends arrive shipshape upon The Other Bank

When doom's been had, and dawns and hauls us all – recalcitrants

Stood hearts in mouth unstrung upon a Further Shore

And here of spangled sentiment sung ardent madrigals

Imploring senses incident sweet intervals

A ghostly haven home

And might it be that such a place should flatly overhaul

This kissed-imperfect splendour, shattering Niagara Falls

The Italian lakes and dancing miles of Kansas wolds

The frank Atlantic holds of foison fed as foods

In milling market halls?

Should even Eden be surpassed when we are carried there

That we should shore our confidence against a long despair

That darling Love should readily every incidence repair?

Of wars and warring nations, famines, cloaks of pain,

The insolent, the terrible, caught by the ears, restrained

Made lessons of, examples, learning the wages of their tares

Being reckoned up, and chastened

Such hest is fast debarred, no guess nor estimate,

Barometer, or plot; that’s not to know

Its frontier line demarcates mountain passes serpentine;

Declines the human gaze supine

But blessed, be rested; trust within the promises obtained

That Love will sole dispose the pale where mystery begins

Those junctures in the future, what's to do with likes of them

Whose soul is sin; and when to flexure, where begin.

Take rest in trust on love; that loved name, Elohim

His majesty regards, and yet his mercy brings

Confirms and adumbrates Messiah's best, kind, cross

Such stuff's enough to know, enough that textures grace

To lowly love we owe him as his creatures

The harridan; the libertine; the paltry marriage breakers -

As All-in-All, we cannot speak Him exculpations

Nor condemnations: all's in his concession

And this to know and grow in gives our best condition

Here on this verdured earth, one great expostulation

Perturbing moves designs to Godly love in us

Its wondrous, magisterial folly, adventured unrestraint

From Andalusia's pastures to the coasts that have no taint

From natal Hubble galaxies to neurones' spectral frames

Throughout there runs illimitable Isaiah's straight highway

In line of length, no breadth; its sign is holy geometry