At King's Cross

A soul tears itself from the body and soars.
It remembers that there is an up.
And there is a down.
Have we really lost faith in that other space?
Have they vanished forever, both Heaven and Hell?
Without unearthly meadows how to meet salvation?
And where will the damned find suitable quarters?
Let us weep, lament the enormity of the loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, loosen our hair.
Let us implore that it be returned to us,
That second space.
---C. Milosz

These steps were once nothing but a vague notion in someone's mind...and before that? Between the thought and the act how much time must have passed...

One day, in the distant past, they gradually took form, congealing like wax that cools in the early hours of the morning. But the form retained something of this flickering light, borrowing something of its transience. At this moment of transition between states the poet would ask: What is inward, what is outward?

Few stop to notice them though; they are the temporary home of the tramps since their shade provides much solace. The city dwellers, the new nomads, think of them -if they do at all- as a place where all journeys begin or end. Looking up, they think to themselves, where does nature end and civilisation start?

But today these stairs are mine; in the instant that I ascend them I am alive again. Without thought I climb, drawn upwards by the sun's brilliant rays, the threads of Time; the warm air that they have absorbed acts to remind one of something profoundly familiar.

Breathing the morning openness of their world, a soul can be dazzled by all that is not 'I'. A deep reverence settles for the stillness that is cut out of dreams.