My God

I saw a man in a robe

with a comb in his hair

and his hands were open

like a book.

There was a woman

sitting cross-legged outside

a supermarket,

her ears plugged with phones,

and everyone passed her by,

eyes sucked into their screens.

She might as well have been alone

and her friend was sitting slumped

beside her;

he was like a mudslide made flesh.

His hands were all worn,

fingertips nicotine yellow;

his shoes were a mess.

The man sat between them both

and calmly held out two hands;

he took one’s hand, then held the other’s.

The three 

were like a wedding band.

And he removed a single earphone

from her ear and

placed it in his own;

the woman stirred.

He looked her in the eye and

without a word

he smiled fully, without smiling,

and the noise that he heard

was an ugly concoction

of fear and pain,

and doubt, laced with thunder

and pouring rain.

There was howling and yowling,

and a mother was crying.

A father shouted blearily,

whilst his empty beer bottle

was drying.

And the man shook his head gently,

as he looked into her eyes.

He squeezed her hand a fraction tighter

and he kissed her on the lips

softly as a feather falling

from a dove’s wings

which had dipped

from a highest elevation.

And now the slumped man’s slumber

broke, and he stared at

this interaction.

And the man turned his head

and saw his satisfaction,

as he touched his face so gently,

and he brushed his arm so lightly.

And with lips so full and heavy

he kissed his mouth so slightly

and a halo there did break out

and above their heads did glow.

And he led them by the hands

into the streets below,

far far below the city lights

to where children played in glass,

where women sold their bodies,

where men cried like rueful brass.

They climbed a flight or two of stairs

and into an empty room;

there was a mattress and one candle,

and the light did break the gloom;

their clothes were dropped onto the floor

and in the light the shadows on the wall

did show the silhouetted three bodies

softly moving, and moving softly,

and the angels there did sing

and their flesh was warm and motley;

and the man, his robe now forsaken,

did kiss these two so hauntingly

that they felt Heaven take them.

He asked them honestly,

‘Will you let me in? I can

see you’ve been a bad, bad girl.

I could kiss away those sins.’

Their eyes were closed

and their spirits free

and they’d never felt such love,

such pleasure and such peace,

and they whispered tremulously

‘My life, my love - my God’,

and their aching was released.