Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

A poem for this Good Friday:

I hammer on that common door,
Too frantic in my superstition,
Transfix with nails that I have broken,
The angry notice of the mind.
Close as the thought that suffers him,
The habit every man in time
Must wear beneath his ironed shirt.

An open mind disturbs my soul,
And in disdain I turn my back
Upon the sun that makes a show
Of half the world, yet still deny
The pain that lives within the past,
The flames sinking upon the spike,
Darkness that man must dread at last.

--from "Tenebrae", by Austin Clarke (the Irish one), p. 17 in the Dolmen Selected Poems, ed. Thomas Kinsella.