Sin
Language is a blessing and a curse –
sometimes uniting, sometimes dividing,
sometimes an arrow, sometimes blown blossoms,
misplaced seeds..
How can we of the Western world
imagine what it’s like to speak a tongue,
as Persians, Hebrews, Aramaics, Arabs
are so blessed that they possess –
where words remember that they come from One
whose word is law, whose word is love;
so words are true at every level of understanding:
say ‘name’ or ‘kingdom’; ‘bread’; or ‘dust’:
a golden ladder from the heaven to earth,
from earth to heaven; we as dust beneath
the chariot wheel, as it drives over
this old potter’s yard; cracking discarded potsherds
back to dust, to mud, to clay, to future pots –
drive carefully, though, around that standpipe
where the grace of water waits to join that fuller’s earth,
or rich red clay, in some new pot, which fire will join in turn
to give it measured life…
so, if we take a word which floats uncertainly
between the mind and heart, seeking to put
its feet on earth, yet raise its eyes to heaven –
like ‘sin’… now there’s a word
to stir the mind, to bleed the heart,
to chill the gut…
language, so the pundits say
(naming that which eludes all division)
should be true at the literal, the allegoric,
the moral, the anagogic –
and, let’s add, the universal and divine:
so where does ‘sin’ put down its feet on earth?
Many pulpits have proclaimed, in the easy tones
of clerics who don’t expect too much
of their suburban congregation,
‘missing the mark’ – assuming Britain
still at Agincourt, the target undisputed…
The Aramaic has its clue: ‘sin’ translates
as ‘unripe deeds’…
So to the metaphoric mind
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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