Poetry

Stained Glass

John Greening

Stained glass, high in the clerestory at York,

or all our wedded lives framed in this sunless

stairwell, a wine merchant from the Rose

at Chartres still rolling brightly off to work.

The grozing. The oxides. Such pains they took.

Handblown and drawn. Fired. A hundred blazing

reds burn through the days since John was king. You raise

binoculars to a Jesse tree and talk

to me of medieval things. That passion

fades now, though you might glance up at the windows

in our daughter’s college. I can see lead

“cames” waiting, numbered pieces, each positioned

for the kiln’s revelation. When they fuse,

how will our glazed lives glow out from the dead?