The South Transept Window, St. Lucia at…

Who ever thinks this is impossible
shall only have a look on the glass, which is similar to you
— Monk of the Abbey of St. Mary and St. Nicholas at Arnstein,   late twelfth century, tr. by Roger Rosewell

In the high left light there’s a bombast figure

of the iconoclast Harley — titled

Chairman of the Committee for the

Demolition of Monuments of Superstition

and Idolatry — in operation mid 1600s.

In forgiveness is lightly engraved in the grisaille glass near the base.

His jig-on-coals is illumined to the foot:

in the light below, skin-fierce shards

of thousanded glass are oblite against an anvil road

black as a telly that’s off.

Here the sanctity of the inextinct is vitrified.

(There is in this, of course, the trick of the numinous,

which apertures the mind then shutters

it with a captured click.)

The second window is abstracted

into a green / yellow / red

that’s near tessellated at points,

yet at its edges approaching random generation

like a screen saver projected. It is infernal.

This color chart dispersal, that’s disordering or

reordering.

Then a spurt of leading leads out of the plaster tracery,

these cames a cooled ore rooting

Lowhampton’s industry to a silica-limed wall —

and the metal hid within a retrace

of all the city’s greatness

that’s gone before. Though now

is lost. There is at last the moving

off from the abstract; a tilting to the concrete:

it seems, right here, that a hundred

buildings are storied in stone-thrown perspective.

A city reinvented.

In four: a clear-paned gemmail

connecting like-to-like, with no change of tint

or shape, no supporting leadlight.

It’s as if it were a house window.

Or something from an office block.

It does not create or stain but gives an outside

falling past Sainsbury’s and the Sander Tower

looming, then the ring road communioned

traffic forming. An open room

pupiled towards rain in its rain-tone,

the study of an unaltared sun.

Source: Poetry (October 2014)