Jesus in the West Country

A builder’s hands. A sailor’s hands.

Crowned with the bull’s horns of Albion,

He walked into the druid wind

All over the western hills’ circles,

Mining the sky for minerals.


Their ship anchored in the Camel’s mouth,

Jesus and his uncle stepped ashore

To touch the white island’s stones.

Israel, your son has come home!


Oracular, the Mendips swallets

Groaned into his soles, all the underground streams

Full of the voices of the dead and unborn

Crying out from the ox-skull-hills,

The star-shafts tonguing carillons

Into the whirlpool of Sheol.


Stonehenge labyrinth drew him in,

Flogged by the sun’s bull-pizzle

In the season of horses and love.

The cows womb birthed him into wisdom,

Stepson of the boneland,

Across the chalk plain’s altar he came

To the bull’s eye, the place of killing.

Demons’ and giants’ dancefloor,

Signed by the royal axe,

Governed by spectres and shadows.

He came,and shooting stars

Flew to destruction over Salisbury Plain.

He came, to lay down like Jacob

With his head upon the stone.


The ministry of rain,stone and sky

Baptized him in the western retreat;

A sermon in the marrow would grow

To an oak tree’s stormy height

And fall as rain on Palestine.