Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?  Robert Browning,"Andrea del Sarto", line 98, 1855.

 

Kicking off his work boots on a day of lazy gooseberry bushes and old Daily Heralds

Jack's eyes slowly rose from the mess of laces squirming around his fingers,

(memories of the front, the hot metal of the gun, fingering,  lingering);

His eyes rose past the dresser, blessed with Lizzie's ‘best’ fruit bowl, up past the flower print

Out, out towards this one sunset, emblazoning this evening sky with the lurid

colours more associated with Renaissance depictions of the crucifixion

than an old ex-soldier with a fly in his eye.

Christ, Jack thought, were this what we fought for on Somme

All those lads dead, all of his memories flooded his brain

A conflagration of tragedies rolled into one enormous

stone that Christ squeezed past on his lonely path towards

Crucifixion. Jack knew, with the certainty born of his own particular bloody-minded dollop of innocence

that THIS hill, upon which his three-bedroomed rented house

was perched, was no less a Golgotha than was the hill outside of old

Jerusalem,  called by the Aramaic word for skull, 

echoed in the semantics of the more Roman word Calvary, 

from the Latin calva, bald head.

 

And now, he thought, before being called in by Lizzze in for his tea:

That this earth, crammed with the flotsam and jetsam, of very heaven,

That this earth, where every common bush was  afire with God,

Was now open to his vision.

For, as he knew well, only he who sees the mightiest creation

will take off his shoes and smile at his children in just exactly this way.