He walked on in faith and weakness
The long passage to Rome
‘Cross blasted wastelands, tottering fortresses
Of a terrain losing its God.
~
Past his hearth beyond the Wall, rock-fast
Yet leaking murderous pagans -
Scrambling they leap in naked blueness
Into ill held gardens of pax Romana.
~
All seemingly lost in the stygian darkness
Faith fast flying in petrified pain
Of bronze swords cutting fleshly pinkness
Lives losing, leaving and lost into silence.
~
Ninia walked, his Roman boots hard hob-nailed
Surely reaching the holy house at islanded Farne
Diurnal tides twice water-kept in sand-firm fastness
Then: sent, left, across the wind-washed Saxon sea.
~
A needle darning a course in ambered gold
Piercing Ptolemy’s sullen Seltic lands
Past once-Gaulish villages turned-out, blackened
His head set towards Hannibal’s elephantine hills.
~
A perigrination in pious hope, blood-blistered
Feet set for Diocletian’s dissected capital:
Porsena’s ancient city’s now glum glory
Where martyrs once wept, their blood and bones arena’d, still.
~
Marcellinus met him, tonsured but stained
By deeds lately done in fear: a
Tiny dust of altar-burn stained with Petrine denial -
Forgiven, yet, raised to papal purple.
~
Two men, humbled, mereness tasked by God’s plan
To save Rome for Christ
And capture souls even unto furthest lands:
Terror reigning, a satanic safety in royal death-throes.
~
Even’s last twilight watched weak warriors pray
In screaming raped city of men in reignèd darkness
Until morn’s new dawn, cracked the icy heartedness
Of the lost lured from their nightmares up to light.
~
Ninia turned once more, in prodigality of a repentant way
Humility, death-facing, unarmed, Latin-charmed
Past Whithourn home, ever northward
Into the unseen lands of impossible charnelled promise.
~
White-stoled, unhidden, a bright beacon beckoning
Beyond fear of unbordered fear, unbidden;
A late-born man-child swaddled in toga’d rank,
A gallic gull cawing ‘Christ’ ‘cross Caledon’s sacred soil.