Celtic Cross
The implicated generations made This symbol of their lives, a stone made light By what is carved on it. The plaiting masks, But not with involutions of a shade, What a stone says and what a stone cross asks.
Something that is not mirrored by nor trapped In webs of water or bag-nets of cloud; The tangled mesh of weed lets it go by.
Only men's minds could ever have unmapped Into abstraction such a territory.
No green bay going yellow over sand Is written on by winds to tell a tale Of death-dishevelled gull or heron, stiff As a cruel clerk with gaunt Writs in his hand —Or even light, that makes its depths a cliff.
Singing responses order otherwise. The tangled generations ravelled out In links of song whose sweet strong choruses Are these stone involutions to the eyes Given to the car in abstract vocables.
The stone remains, and the cross, to let us know Their unjust, hard demands, as symbols do. But on them twine and grow beneath the dove Serpents of wisdom whose cool statements show Such understanding that it seems like love.
NORMAN MACCAIG
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