The Blank Page

The Blank Page

John F. Deane

It began as a most un-comfortable world, children, just like me,
like you, child Jesus, cowed and crowded in a bench;

I learned to write my name, yours too, Jesus, with a stump of
chalk: and the chalk wiped away so easily, rising in a white dust.

The heart is vulnerable, and will not settle to an ultimate
unknowing; and so I search for you again, on the firm ground of
the cosmic everyday;

it is as if the hand moves, page after page, shaping, re-shaping,
and when it pauses to write finis the pages revert to blanks and
swither all away.

I grieve that it may be death that names us most importantly;

the past, extant in memory, though flimsy as chalk-dust, remains
sacrament and gift,

and I have searched, a child still faltering after so many impatient
erasures, for signs of your love, written perhaps in chalk before
eyes that will not see.

---

John F. Deane
Poet

John F. Deane is an Irish poet who has published more than a dozen collections, including his most recent book Naming of the Bones (2021, Carcanet). He has received many honours including the O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry.

Photography by Noita Digital