Jacques Coetzee
In the end, you said,
it wasn’t their love of learning
that saved them.
Scholars would have rediscovered
Homer and Ovid, Plato and Aristotle;
written commentaries on them for a thousand years,
yet never produced
the lament of Héloise,
or Francis of Assissi
preaching his heart out to the birds,
or Dante walking the goat-paths
and looking for the stair to heaven.
In the end it was the turn
inwards that transformed them:
the love of someone
hidden deep inside the one they were talking to;
the bewilderment
of having to keep body and soul
together;
the clash of two worlds just beneath the skin,
between one peal of sacred bells,
one song, one forbidden kiss
and the next.
Featured on 4 February 2021
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