St Luke

A wall, a bastion, A living forehead with its slow whorl of hair And a bull’s large, sombre, glancing eye And glistening, adhesive muzzle With cavernous nostrils where the winds run hot Snorting defiance Or greedily snuffling behind the cows.

Horns The golden horns of power, Power to kill, power to create Such as Moses had, and God, Head-power.

Shall great wings flame from his shoulder-sockets Assyrian-wise? It would be no wonder.

Knowing the thunder of his heart The massive thunder of his dew-lapped chest Deep and reverberating, It would be no wonder if great wings, like flame, fanned out from the furnace-cracks of his shoulder-sockets.

Thud! Thud! Thud! And the roar of black bull’s blood in the mighty passages of his chest.

Ah, the dewlap swings pendulous with excess. The great, roaring weight above Like a furnace dripping a molten drip.

The urge, the massive, burning ache Of the bull’s breast. The open furnace-doors of his nostrils.

For what does he ache, and groan?

In his breast a wall?

Nay, once it was also a fortress wall, and the weight of a vast battery. But now it is a burning hearthstone only, Massive old altar of his own burnt offering.

It was always an altar of burnt offering His own black blood poured out like a sheet of flame over his fecundating herd As he gave himself forth.

But also it was a fiery fortress frowning shaggily on the world And announcing battle ready.

Since the Lamb bewitched him with that red-struck flag His fortress is dismantled His fires of wrath are banked down His horns turn away from the enemy.

He serves the Son of Man.

And hear him bellow, after many years, the bull that serves the Son of Man. Moaning, booing, roaring hollow Constrained to pour forth all his fire down the narrow sluice of procreation Through such narrow loins, too narrow.

Is he not over-charged by the dammed-up pressure of his own massive black blood Luke, the Bull, the father of substance, the Providence Bull, after two thousand years? Is he not over-full of offering, a vast, vast offer of himself Which must be poured through so small a vent?

Too small a vent.

Let him remember his horns, then. Seal up his forehead once more to a bastion, Let it know nothing. Let him charge like a mighty catapult on the red-cross flag, let him roar out challenge on the world And throwing himself upon it, throw off the madness of his blood. Let it be war.

And so it is war. The bull of the proletariat has got his head down.