There Was A Saviour

(album: Words For The Dying - 1989)

There was a saviour
Rarer than radium
Commoner than water, crueler than truth
Children kept from the sun
Assembled at his tongue
To hear the golden note turn in a groove
Prisoners of wishes locked their eyes
In the jails and studies of his keyless smiles

The voice of children says
From a lost wilderness
There was calm to be done in his safe unrest
When hindering man hurt
Man, animal or bird
We hid our fears in the murdering breath
Silence, silence to do, when the earth grew loud
In lairs and asylums of the tremendous shout

There was glory to hear
In the churches of his tears
Under his downy arm you sighed as he struck
O you who could not cry
On to the ground when a man died
Put a tear for joy in the unearthly flood
And laid your cheek against a cloud-formed shell
Now in the dark there is only yourself and myself

Two proud, blacked brothers cry
Winter-locked side by side
To this inhospitable hollow year
O we could not stir
One lean sigh when we heard
Greed on man beating near and fire neighbour
But wailed and nested in the sky-blue wall
Now break a giant tear for the little known fall

For the drooping of homes
That did not nurse our bones
Brave deaths of only ones but never found
Now see, alone in us
Our own true strangers' dust
Ride through the doors of our unentered house
Exiled in us we arouse the soft
Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks