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This poem is taken from PN Review 110, Volume 22 Number 6, July - August 1996.

Links (translated from the Welsh by Richard Poole) Gwyneth Lewis

Translated from the Welsh by Richard Poole


1
Here Scripture begins with a man in a jungle:
thorns encircle
his flesh, a spiral
of monkish letters spun from gold; here's a miracle

of divinity, here's talent's alpha
and knowing's end;
here the world comes round
again in scarlet ink with the stigmata

of man on scripture's cross; here's the Word's
fate in words' thicket;
here's God in the net
of his own sentence; here's wax's wounds

on parchment-skin; here's the apex
of eloquence because,
in crude blood, the grammar of grace
...


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