The Ninth Lesson

This poem was kindly published earlier this year on the website The Amethyst Review. While I hope you will enjoy reading it, it obviously pales beside the verses of St John’s Gospel which inspired it – and which, if you don’t know it, I recommend as one of the most powerful passages in literature, especially in the King James Version. It is typically read as the Ninth Lesson in the “Nine Lessons and Nine Carols” services in the approach to Christmas.

The Ninth Lesson
(The Gospel of St. John 1:1-14)

What is it in these words 
that brushes centuries of science 
aside, to reach the heart?
How does St John’s ‘true Light’,
sustained through distance, 
changing tongues, and years
of tarnishing by priest and prince,
trump our Enlightenment?

It’s safe, familiar: virgin birth, 
the forty days of wilderness, 
the water into wine, King James’s 
scholars’ pace and poetry. 
We heard it in our childhood choirs 
and hear its echoes everywhere
in poems, politics, TV; 
it may be coded in our genes.

But take away the magical
and listen closely: safety disappears. 
We’re on the edge, unconfident 
of what we knew, our candle almost 
cancelled by a darkness glimpsed 
but too complete to comprehend; 
a darkness we’re compelled, 
and afraid, to explore.