Bruegel Poem by David Cooke

There are times your dancers annihilate
the humanist in me. In that northern
Cockaigne you viewed with a realist's eye
their heartiness tramps to raucous tuning.
The women are untouchable, blatant.
The yielding trestles are piled with plates.

And such lost revels what were they to you?
Did you celebrate, despise, or pity?
For there is shown mere lumbering daftness
as feet clump time on the floor. No heroes
of sentiment or ideal, they dance out
steps beyond all sins or goodness.

Yet here I see on one bleak canvas how,
primitive and docile, your six blind men
appall. Against a grizzled wash of sky,
a sparse landscape of church and trees,
they make their trek of faith: a procession
of pain from one dark ledge to the next.

Theirs is a suffering beyond reach
of plausible gods. Their desolate sphere
an abandoned acre, here laid bare
to affront our safest minds. Blind sticks jerk
as they stumble on the bank of a stream -
while we tread the limits of what words mean.