Resurrection: Borgo San Sepolcro

Today it is time. Warm enough, finally
to ease the lids apart, the wax lips of a breaking bud
defeated by the steady push, hour after hour,
opening to show wet and dark, a tongue exploring,
an eye shrinking against the dawn. Light
like a fishing line draws its catch straight up,
then slackens for a second. The flat foot drops,
the shoulder sags. Here is the world again, well-known,
the dawn greeted in snoring dreams of a familiar
winter everyone preferes. So the black eyes
fixed half-open, start to search, ravenous,
imperative, they look for pits, for hollows where,
their food can be decanted, look
for rooms ready for commandeering, ready
to be defeated by the push, the green implacable
rising. So he pauses, gathering the strength
in his flat foot, as the perspective buckles under him,
and the dreamers lean dangerously inwards. Contained,
exhausted, hungry, death running off his limbs like
drops
from a shower, gathering himself. We wait,
paralysed as if in dreams, for his spring.

Rowan Williams: Headwaters. Perpetua, 2008. Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection hangs in the civic hall of Borgo San Sepolcro, Tuscany.