OVER the past 15 years, I have written several hundred thousand words of comment on these pages. My view of a writing life based around journalism is that it begins with reportage, moves to comment, and that comment eventually begins to merge with reflection. None of these categories can flourish without the others.
After thinking long about what my last piece of work for Ekklesia might be, I gathered up my courage and decided that it would not be prose.
So, here is my last comment and first poem on this site. In our troubled, beautiful, fierce world, may we all, ‘religious’ or not, keep company with the work of faith.
Abraham and Isaac
Heat stood on the mountain track, clubbing
them with unseen mass,
clinging to their faces,
dragging dry at their lungs
as they strained against the gradient,
bent beneath bundles of brushwood.
No air moved on the stones they piled.
Only the quickness of a lizard disturbed the dust
and they were silent.
What ground here?
What could hold them now?
What,
What?
What…
could be formed? Here, in terror time,
made out of looselaid, shifting, dwindling land
crumbling to despair?
…nothing.
Then the flash, arcing between the dark
of the knife and the light
of the promise,
the vertiginous work of faith.
————
© Jill Segger (England) is a freelance writer who contributes to the Church Times, The Catholic Herald, Tribune, The Friend and Reform, among other publications. Her acclaimed book Words Out of Silence was published by Ekklesia in 2019. She is an active member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Jill became an honorary associate director in 2010 and is now Ekklesia’s Contributing Editor. She is also a musician and has been a composer. Her recent columns are available here and her pre-2021 articles can be found here. You can follow Jill on Twitter: @quakerpen