Rejecting The Icon Poem by Christopher Shepheard

I knelt before the icon where the god
Of pigment posed, his face in rigour set;
His eyes, dimmed by the dusty craqualure,
Stared unseeing past me down the nave;
His palm was raised against me, and it pressed
Against the picture pane to keep the world
Corruptible at bay, the god remote.
It hovered at me, waiting there, a cold
Recoiling viper, poised to strike my soul
Like a flaming meteor into to hell.

The light that pierced the painted window leaves
Laid down a pattern on my flesh of shapes
And colours men had fictioned into saints
With washed and perfumed feet, their togas crisp
And laundered in the Greco-Roman style.
Voices sung the harmonies assumed
For angel choirs, and yet it seemed to me
The beauty of that Phrygian modal chant
Was fired by the aspiring soul of man
To glimpse the realms of immortality.

Further down the nave a censer spumed
Incense smoke to tell my senses this
Was blessed air — unlike the stuff outside —
And fumigate the chambers of my soul.
My knees were numb, the draughts of hallowed ice
Had found the crick my looking up had groined
Into my peccant neck. The god in paint,
Oblivious and unmoved, still stared beyond
Me, through the open chancel door. I rose
And shuffled meekly out into the world.

Outside the sunlight greeted me and painted
Rainbows in my eyelash; charms of birds
Exulted, and behind the burgeoning rush
Of life into my soul I hailed the Spring,
All unabsolved, where numberless blossoms, souls,
Down-floated to regenerate. I turned.
The church was smaller now, the god was hulled
Like furtive cargo, bound for some remote
And shameful destination. Incense hung
About the fabric of my clothes and smelled
More of corruption than the pungent tang
Of leaf mould oozing moisture at my feet.

(1994)