On the seventh day, Man
Recreated the earth in his Image.
I searched the green land for my face,
Occluded fields for enchantment,
Carrying in my eye the image of a ghost

Fleeing the one available earth,
Fleeing dreams of universal plague,
Declaiming the red and weeping moon,
The signs that roared and broke again

Fixed upon each moment, fixed and
Un-thought each hammering second,
Hope a revelation perverse and private,
The shaken earth barbed by
The Word-Wielder in His clouds

Who are you to turn from face to face
Fleeing, seeking heaven in the earth,
Strange and foreign ways
In Star-fallen woods, to flee,
And so curse the mirror of my Face?

That one who danced the spirits
From the tall, ageing pines,
That one who traded words of scripture
With the wide-winged Satan
In the night before the paths
Turned gold and the sun still-born,

That one whose sight was clear
And caught the dark of Your eyes

Perverse, when four-thousand years
And futures in the hearts of billions
Wars that have an end and war unending
Crucifixions of His own

Scattered and heaped and holy,
Become a welcome refutation
Of Power beyond reasoning

Wise enough in strange and foreign ways
To know all but silence is posturing
And mine the foot-stamp of a child,
Before the God who needs no image
To see the features of the soul

Godly enough to bear the words of
Those who crucify a snake to call it
God; repentant in his unrepentance
Unproud in his egotism, the
Cunnering of the stage-magician,
Going to and fro in the unrested day
Of likenesses, where only insubstantial
Substances fill hollow beliefs

by Dylan Dykins