Cathedral at Greenwich University

Cathedral
by Gillian Clarke

Before the Saints, Dyfrig, Teilo, Eiddogwy;
before the bishops, the builders and stonemasons;
before artists and sculptors, Rossetti, Epstein;
before music, organists and choirs;
before the architects, Wood, Seddon, Prichard, Pace;
before the poetry of psalm and hymn and common prayer;

before there were words
for ‘cathedral’, ‘architecture’, ‘art’,
when our first house was the great original forest,
when our ancestors walked in the aisles of trees
and gazed up at such loftiness confused,
perhaps, by inexplicable longing;

before there was a word for wonder,
or names for stars, or footprints on the moon;
before St Teilo raised his little church just here;
before a man looked at a tree and made a cross,
and felt the hammering rain and thought of nails
there must have been a first creative act.

First mark, first word, first hymn to awe,
first poem with something to say of the human heart,
first vision of a building taller than a forest,
aisled, vaulted, clerestoried with sunlight,
because we were forest-dwellers once
and learned our metaphors from trees.