This autumn day the new cross is set up
On the unfinished church, above the trees,
Bright as a new penny, tipping the tip
Of the elongated spire in the sunny breeze,
And is at ease;
Newcomer suddenly, calmly looking down
On this American university town.
Someone inside me sketches a cross—askew,
A child’s—on seeing that stick crossed with a stick,
Some simple ancestor, perhaps, that knew,
Centuries ago when all were Catholic,
That this archaic trick
Brings to the heart and the fingers what was done
One spring day in Judaea to Three in One;
When God and Man in more than love’s embrace,
Far from their heaven and tumult died,
And the holy Dove fluttered above that place
Seeking its desolate nest 1 the broken side,
And Nature cried
To see Heaven doff its glory to atone
For man, lest he should die in tame, alone.
I think of the Church, that stretched magnificence
Housing the crib, the desert, and the tree,
And the good Lord who lived on poverty’s pence
Among the fishermen of Galilee,
Courting mortality,
And schooled himself to learn his human part:
A poor man skilled in dialectic art.
What reason for that splendour of blue and gold
For One so great and poor He was past all need?
What but impetuous love that could not hold
Its storm of spending and must scatter its seed
In blue and gold and deed,
And write its busy Books on Books of Days
To attempt end never touch the sum of praise.
I look at the church again, and yet again,
And think of those who house together in Hell,
Cooped by ingenious theological men
Expert to track the sour and musty smell
Of sins they know too well;
Until grown proud, they crib in rusty bars
The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Yet fortune to the new church, and may its door
Never be shut, or yawn in empty state
To daunt the poor im spirit, the always poor.
Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, may it watt
Here for its true estate.
All’s still to do; roof, window and wall are bare.
I look, and do not doubt that He is there.