We witness in silent ways, swallow voices
into our fabric of stone and mud and dust,
where else do you think the day’s sound
lives once airborne, does it fade like silks,
grow colourless on tapestry for the altar’s
frontal, pure linen for chasubles and copes?
(Fine threads on a chasuble where a needle
stabbed; over, around, tracings of smothered
light, lost resurrections, the chalice brimful.)
We bear the weight of cries from a child’s
sickbed, a woman’s rage;spiders hear it, too,
snag a thread of pain, weave it into corners.
reubenwoolley 