We saw a mighty grave at Calvary.
Tall, the proud angel looking east,
the structure looked close to collapse.
The bottom had fallen away,
the hillside itself eroded,
the inner foundation
of the tomb
revealed as a
buckling thicket of
bricks.
A hundred years old and
dangerously close to ruin
I saw this tomb as a
model of vanity and lies.
The complexity we imagine ourselves to be is
busy within the language of lies.
Reaching back through the generations
of a single human being’s life I think
language itself is a carnival of fibs,
a circus of entertainments and vagaries
too thick and selfish to remember.
