Poem and notes: Keeping the Glass
This poem responds to my learning about parishioners who hid fragments of medieval stained glass during the iconoclasm that gripped East Anglia and the Fens during the 16th and 17th Centuries.
I was moved by the idea that an image could be powerful enough to be destroyed, and then powerful in another way to the rescuer of its fragments. It made me think differently about risk and salvage as actions connecting humans and objects. Some of the rescued glass later worked its way into restored windows during the Victorian era, and sometimes in ways that created mysterious anatomies and landscapes—a face made of other faces, for example.
Imagine the sound—ricochet of shattered glass
clatter of shards, of saints atomised
Picture the iconoclast’s hand—the exact moment
the window splits the brick’s flightpath,
the brick a little warm from being held
Perhaps the wrecking was done at night
the glass dark, its many eyes unmet
each image, symbol smashed and catalogued,
Imagine the windows gone, air rushing in
in a great levelling of atmospheres
And afterwards, after the spectacle,
going there under the cover of an errand
to look for faces in the grit, to gather
fragments of depicted miracles
and pocket them away to britches, chimneys,
jars of horsegrease, blanket hems, the larder’s
lump of lard, anywhere unlikely—
Think of the hidden medieval glass,
colourful and rare as an insect
Imagine its resonance, a small chipped secret
clanging in the vacant chancel of a faith
Imagine being that sure our uncertainties matter—
that you pass the glass along over centuries,
keeping it for a safe time, not knowing
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