Fiona Larkin

To Hold God as a Broken Thing

after Agha Shahid Ali

I used to fix my god with gold —
doubts gleaming in the dark
each molten streak
another scar
on a vessel of air.

Jesus wept, it is written. Let this cup pass.
Let my flesh not suffer the slash of betrayal.
Jesus wept and prayed to the father,
the father ever incorporeal.
But the father is sobbing now.
Incarnate familiar,
wounded in my embrace.

Hush. There are other souls, god,
out there waiting for you.
Hush, now. It’s not you
it’s me (and you know when I lie).

I should have known my god
was a jealous god, unsatisfied
when I protest I love all
I was taught that he’d made.
God, I love the curl of a shell,
each leaf’s symmetry, the sky
on fire in the west. I’m more
than an architect, he stutters, is this
what you call pantheism? like telling
a lover you love the idea of love
but not specifically him?
It’s not enough, not enough.

Another storm in his chest,
he is the author of all lament,
cries out the shudder of abandon
in a splintering light.

And I? I cannot repair the thing I loved.

Structural alteration

Someone has demolished
the canopy of stone
which sheltered the altar,
shattered its sky-blue ceiling
where an artist painted
the impossible:
stars visible in daylight.

The minister huddles
in hollow air. I think
of the scurry of woodlice
when a rock is shifted,
blinded by an access of light.

The white dome is intact.
The carved mouse still creeps
up the strut of the pew.
What’s restored is orderly
as the stations of the cross —
a construct which fills in
the gaps, the way music
returns words to my lips
of a forgotten hymn.

But I scurry, exposed
to what I am lacking.
Parentless, roofless.
Behind my lids, gilt
constellations persist,
persuasive as childhood.

Fiona Larkin’s debut collection, Rope of Sand, was published by Pindrop Press in 2023. The title poem was highly commended in the Forward Prizes. Her pamphlets are ‘Vital Capacity’ (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) and ‘A Dovetail of Breath’ (Rack Press, 2020), and she manages innovative projects with Corrupted Poetry. https://fionalarkinpoetry.wordpress.com/

Fiona wrote the following about ‘To Hold God as a Broken Thing’ and ‘Structural Alteration’:

 Like many cradle Catholics, I put away my faith as soon as I gained some independence. But it was an integral part of my childhood and education, and won’t stay quiet. Agha Shahid Ali’s line “God sobs in my arms” from ‘Tonight’ inspired the perspective of my first poem. And the absence of the altar canopy in my old parish church, to which I’d returned for my mother’s funeral, made me think of how faith, like a parent, may — for some, and for a time —  provide an essential shelter from the world.