Black Square Icon Poem by Keith Shorrocks Johnson

God decided to create the world
To divest himself of it forever
Ceasing thought to become free
Unhindered by form and likeness
Retreating in perfection
To emptiness and endless timelessness

But as what matters is conserved
He passed the manifest universe
Down to mankind and his son
With its beginnings and its endings
And with the world came the word
The last inkling of enlightenment.

Though in love and pity of this creation
And the weight of suffering that ensued
The son offered mediation with death
That mankind should also free itself
But in its overreach of thought and pride
It came to own and rule primordial chaos.

Crushed by the insubstantial as we are
In the Black Square the echo remains
Of what is both divine and divested
And of the perfection of initial creativity
Offering a covenant of shape and substance
By which our understanding can be reconciled.