Poetry

This poem by ArtServe member Catherine James reflects on an experience of walking a labyrinth. Praying with the labyrinth is one of the optional activites at this year's ArtServe Festival in October.

Today, I walked the labyrinth.
My feet made no sound
between the black, incised, deliberate, lines
limiting my steps,
slowing them to heart-beat pace.

The stone beneath glowed red,
formed in long-forgotten seas,
its surface cracked,
pounded
by the storms of millennia.

And, as I traced the serpentine coils,
the twisting, stem-like spirals,
sounds dimmed.

Memories enter the maze with me
revolving with the paths
stretching and contracting with each turn.

Life itself, they say, is a journey
a pilgrimage,
and other feet walk with me on its way.

But amid them all, the ones that come and go,
 tread those of One
whose feet walked once the roads of Galilee
and climbed that hard hill-path to Calvary –
unnoticed in the movement of the day,

but softly,
steadily,
so softly,

pacing the labyrinth roads of life
with me.

© Catherine James