1695: The Lamb | Linda Gregg
"The Lamb"
Linda Gregg
It was a picture I had after the war.
A bombed English church. I was too young
to know the word English or war,
but I knew the picture.
The ruined city still seemed noble.
The cathedral with its roof blown off
was not less godly. The church was the same
plus rain and sky. Birds flew in and out
of the holes God’s fist made in the walls.
All our desire for love or children
is treated like rags by the enemy.
I knew so much and sang anyway.
Like a bird who will sing until
it is brought down. When they take
away the trees, the child picks up a stick
and says, this is a tree, this the house
and the family. As we might. Through a door
of what had been a house, into the field
of rubble, walks a single lamb, tilting
its head, curious, unafraid, hungry.
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters/and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,/with four dead and eleven wounded./And around these, in a larger circle/of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered/and one graveyard. But the young woman/who was/buried in the city she came from,/at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,/enlarges the circle considerably,/and the solitary man mourning her death/at the distant shores of a country far across the sea/includes the entire world in the circle./And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans/that reaches up to the throne of God and/beyond, making/a circle with no end and no God.
Linda Gregg
It was a picture I had after the war.
A bombed English church. I was too young
to know the word English or war,
but I knew the picture.
The ruined city still seemed noble.
The cathedral with its roof blown off
was not less godly. The church was the same
plus rain and sky. Birds flew in and out
of the holes God’s fist made in the walls.
All our desire for love or children
is treated like rags by the enemy.
I knew so much and sang anyway.
Like a bird who will sing until
it is brought down. When they take
away the trees, the child picks up a stick
and says, this is a tree, this the house
and the family. As we might. Through a door
of what had been a house, into the field
of rubble, walks a single lamb, tilting
its head, curious, unafraid, hungry.
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters/and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,/with four dead and eleven wounded./And around these, in a larger circle/of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered/and one graveyard. But the young woman/who was/buried in the city she came from,/at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,/enlarges the circle considerably,/and the solitary man mourning her death/at the distant shores of a country far across the sea/includes the entire world in the circle./And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans/that reaches up to the throne of God and/beyond, making/a circle with no end and no God.