Didsbury, Peter: A Riddle

Close to death, and heedless of the State, the Emperor Justinian sits far into the night. In the company of a few old priests he is pondering the macabre riddles of the Divine Will. In another place, a navigator is
slowly bleeding to death in the back of a doomed bomber.

Justinian. My eighty-somethingth year. I get mixed up.
Navigating, I think. Darkness crumping into insurrections,
or flak. Light reduced to what will serve a table.
Light remaining the problem. When the moon
shines through the palace windows, it breaks upon the floor.
They catch the moon in metal bowls, and use it to finger us out.
What am I doing here, forty years on? Or is it longer?
The red and white of the maps recall the gift
my stooping priests bestow upon the people.
Their hands reach forward. They sit frozen in their gear.
The world lies done in coloured cubes upon the palace floor.
A flickering candle. Dropping through cloud over Aachen
it was Anastasis, as bright as day. And I was Christ,
and I reached for the hand of Adam. Never grasping.
How can this remorseless bird be flying so high up?
What life obtains inside the Dove? Where is the dawn?
This night must either be ending now, or going on for ever.
It is one more riddle. I plot and plot, but cannot get us home.

Author's note: Anastasis is Christ's Harrowing of Hell. I was imagining a moment of timelessness at the moment of death in which these individual souls meet and are confused. The poem shews the effects of reading Randall Jarrell concurrently with H. St L.B. Moss's The Birth of the Middle Ages, from which part of the epigraph is adapted.