Only a sheep’s fodder bush and a screw pine
And a dark sea going by at a piaffer
And a little palæocrystic light keeping watch
Through the phengites of this panopticon
On mankind in the last stages of pellagra.Now the light, the paxwax of infinity,
Becomes rigid as a bar of iron.
No phosphene or photopsia any longer
Can supplement or supplant it, and in vain
A voice still cries ‘Ephphatha’ which means nothing
In the poor pasilaly of all other sound
Which is no more than a rattle of broken bones
On the invisible pamphract of God.
from The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, Volume I (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1985), 393.
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