St. Thomas Didymus: A Poem by Denise Levertov

In the hot street at noon I saw him
                                 a small man
gray but vivid, standing forth
                              beyond the crowd’s buzzing
holding in desperate grip his shaking
                                    teethgnashing son,

and thought him my brother.

I heard him cry out, weeping, and speak
                                                      those words,
Lord, I believe, help thou
                              mine unbelief,

and knew him
                        my twin:

a man whose entire being
                                      had knotted itself
into the one tightdrawn question,
                                                   Why,
why has this child lost his childhood in suffering,
                        why is this child who will soon be a man
tormented, torn, twisted?
                             Why is he cruelly punished
who has done nothing except be born?

The twin of my birth
                                 was not so close
as that man I heard
                              say what my heart
sighed with each beat, my breath silently
                                                      cried in and out,
in and out.

After the healing,
                           he, with his wondering
newly peaceful boy, receded;
                                no one
dwells on the gratitude, the astonished joy,
                                                   the swift
acceptance and forgetting.
                                I did not follow
to see their changed lives.
                                What I retained
was the flash of kinship.
                             Despite
all that I witnessed,
                          his question remained
my question, throbbed like a stealthy cancer,
                                                   known
only to doctor and patient. To others
                           I seemed well enough.

So it was
       that after Golgotha
                                 my spirit in secret
lurched in the same convulsed writhings
                                                   that tore that child
before he was healed.
                              And after the empty tomb
when they told me He lived, had spoken to Magdalen,
                                                   told me
that though He had passed through the door like a ghost
                           He had breathed on them
the breath of a living man —
                        even then
when hope tried with a flutter of wings
                           to lift me —
still, alone with myself,
                        my heavy cry was the same: Lord,
I believe,
         help thou mine unbelief.

I needed
         blood to tell me the truth,
the touch
         of blood. Even
my sight of the dark crust of it
                                             round the nailholes
didn’t thrust its meaning all the way through
                                to that manifold knot in me
that willed to possess all knowledge,
                                    refusing to loosen
unless that insistence won
                           the battle I fought with life

But when my hand
                  led by His hand’s firm clasp
entered the unhealed wound,
                        my fingers encountering
rib-bone and pulsing heat,
                           what I felt was not
scalding pain, shame for my
                           obstinate need,
but light, light streaming
                           into me, over me, filling the room
as if I had lived till then
                  in a cold cave, and now
coming forth for the first time,
                           the knot that bound me unravelling,
I witnessed
                  all things quicken to color, to form,
my question
                  not answered but given
                                             its part
in a vast unfolding design lit
                                    by a risen sun.