Every Thursday during Lent, I have posted a poem that I find helpful for deeper engagement with Jesus’ journey to the Cross and the significance of Lent. Because I will post something different for Maundy Thursday tomorrow, I’m posting this week’s poem one day early. Here is Geoffery Hill’s poem “Lachrimae Amantis” from Tenebrae. Geoffrey Hill was one of the most significant English language poets of the 20th and 21st centuries.

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What is there in my heart that you should sue
so fiercely for its love? What kind of care
brings you as though a stranger to my door
through the long night and in the icy dew

seeking the heart that will not harbour you,
that keeps itself religiously secure?
At this dark solstice filled with frost and fire
your passion’s ancient wounds must bleed anew.

So many nights the angel of my house
has fed such urgent comfort through a dream,
whispered “your lord is coming, he is close”

that I have drowsed half-faithful for a time
bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse:
“tomorrow I shall wake to welcome him.”

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Previous poems in this series:

John Donne, ‘Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness”

Langston Hughes, “The Ballad of Mary’s Son”

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day”

Luci Shaw, “Judas, Peter”

Li-Young Lee, “Nativity”

E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), “Brier (Good Friday)”