Meeting Among The Mountains

The little pansies by the road have turned     Away their purple faces and their gold,     And evening has taken all the bees from the thyme,     And all the scent is shed away by the cold.     Against the hard and pale blue evening sky     The mountain's new-dropped summer snow is clear     Glistening in steadfast stillness: like transcendent     Clean pain sending on us a chill down here.     Christ on the Cross! - his beautiful young man's body     Has fallen dead upon the nails, and hangs     White and loose at last, with all the pain     Drawn on his mouth, eyes broken at last by his pangs.     And slowly down the mountain road, belated,     A bullock wagon comes; so I am ashamed     To gaze any more at the Christ, whom the mountain snows     Whitely confront; I wait on the grass, am lamed.     The breath of the bullock stains the hard, chill air,     The band is across its brow, and it scarcely seems     To draw the load, so still and slow it moves,     While the driver on the shaft sits crouched in dreams.     Surely about his sunburnt face is something     That vexes me with wonder. He sits so still     Here among all this silence, crouching forward,     Dreaming and letting the bullock take its will.     I stand aside on the grass to let them go;      - And Christ, I have met his accusing eyes again,     The brown eyes black with misery and hate, that look     Full in my own, and the torment starts again.     One moment the hate leaps at me standing there,     One moment I see the stillness of agony,     Something frozen in the silence that dare not be     Loosed, one moment the darkness frightens me.     Then among the averted pansies, beneath the high     White peaks of snow, at the foot of the sunken Christ     I stand in a chill of anguish, trying to say     The joy I bought was not too highly priced.     But he has gone, motionless, hating me,     Living as the mountains do, because they are strong,     With a pale, dead Christ on the crucifix of his heart,     And breathing the frozen memory of his wrong.     Still in his nostrils the frozen breath of despair,     And heart like a cross that bears dead agony     Of naked love, clenched in his fists the shame,     And in his belly the smouldering hate of me.     And I, as I stand in the cold, averted flowers,     Feel the shame-wounds in his hands pierce through my own,     And breathe despair that turns my lungs to stone     And know the dead Christ weighing on my bone.