THE TREE

So God is born
   from our loss of nerve?
He is the tree that looms up
in our darkness, at whose feet
we must fall to be set again
on its branches on some April day
of the heart.
       He needs us
as a conductor his choir
for the performance of an unending
music.
     What we may not
do is to have our horizon bare,
   is to make our way
on through a desert white with the bones
of our dead faiths. It is why,
some say, if there were no tree,
we would have to set one up
     for us to linger under,
its drops falling on us as though to confirm
he has blood like ourselves.
We have set one up, but
of steel and so leafless that
     he has taken himself
off out of the reach
of our transmitted prayers.
          Nightly
we explore the universe
on our wave-lengths, picking up nothing
     but those acoustic ghosts
that could as well be mineral
     signalling to mineral
as immortal mind communicating with itself.