The Message

Palimpsest

And who could understand
this map
which time and nature drew?
This coat of many colours
which on that surface
grew in subtle combinations
of ochre, tan and dun,
in every variation of yellowing
to brown?
Umber daubs spread frontiers,
and mould the grey-green seas –
sere stains marked out the desert sands.
No hand had ever drawn them,
these continents of old. The art
was in the sunlight, and humid air;
a prank of ink; a lakelet
from the scribe’s own brow;
the imprint of a fold.
And in, amid, beneath this work
strange serpent pen-paths glide,
and loop and whorl
and coil and curve, traverse
in flowing lines, and roam
diverse directions, one laid
upon the next.
But locked deep under everything
and near as old as Time
– Lo, look! –
one faint, bewildering,
compelling text abides.
And signs there are that buried
in its undeciphered sprawl
lie tidings from a farther,
more mystical, more holy past –
remoter than them all …

What spirit voices
call to us? From shadows
and from dust?

This ancient, fragile remnant,
immeasurably old, this detritus of ages,
holds the debris of their souls …
but lost to us, and gone from us,
and passed from us as though
it were the gods themselves had said
at the sealing of a door:
‘Beautious is the word herein,
beautious and wise withal;
but a sacred, tight-locked secret
forbidden unto all,
till time shall ravish it to naught
or men, as angels, bring it forth’.


(From ‘Journeys in Time’)