God's Grandeur

God’s Grandeur*

All around them lay the dust. Everywhere the sun. The torturous heat, the smell of burnt things, and on every rock, every weed, every grain of sand – the mark of humankind. They lay awake at night, listening to the crack of another boulder broken as the thrum of almost-living machinery seeped into their bones.

And this was the world, in all its vast, bleak glory.

A man woke up early this morning, rising even before the sun. His name had once been Gerard, but the desert had stripped it away, leaving him only with ‘Pops’. Pops to the manager. Pops to the other workers, all younger. Pops even to the visiting supervisor. Gerard was a distant mirage, seen sometimes trudging away across the dust.

But Pops was awake now. He hadn’t meant to be up at this time and the day would only be harder for it – fatigue added to already worn down muscles. The younger men were alright. It didn’t matter how long they worked or how long they slept. Youth provided them with energy nearly beyond measure. It was only spirit that they sometimes lacked, and the desert could take that from anyone.

Pops stepped out from his make-shift tent. He surveyed the grey expanse of land with a slow, knowing eye. Another monochrome sunrise on the desert. A grayscale image with no contrast. He sighed inwardly, quelling his frustration.

“And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell; the soil…”

The lines of a poem long forgotten came crawling, disjointed, back to him. For a moment the next line escaped him. He continued to study the horizon until it visited his mind.

“Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”

Pops looked down at his feet, encased as they were in once-white socks. It was close enough. Bare soil and shod foot – Pops considered this breach of nature until the sun assumed its place in the sky.

The day went as it always did. They dug, they drilled, they heaved and lifted and shoved and at the end of it all nothing seemed to be done. The men complained, muttered abuse under their breath, cursed intermittently. It did not change anything.

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod.”

Pops watched the sunset from his tent. He peeked through a gap in the tough cloth so that no one else would notice him, for always there were appearances to be kept up, even when lost in the desert.

There was, if possible, even less colour than there had been in the sunrise that morning.

“It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed…”

Pops watched the sun as it sank wearily into the dust. Flamed out. The dark of night drifted overhead with equal lethargy. Only when Pops was zipping up his clandestine peep-hole did a certain liquid blackness fill the sky. “The ooze of oil,” he breathed, and felt instantly nauseous.

So, this was what it meant to be crushed by all that the world was not.

A man woke up early the next morning, rising even before the sun. Pops couldn’t fathom why his body had decided to wake again at this time. That was, until he heard voices outside his tent and sensed a certain acidic taste in the air.

The younger men’s excited tenors urged him out of his tent. One spotted him, called him over. The man’s eyes were bright in the cool grey light before dawn.

“Pops, they finally did it. They blew up one of the nuclear storage things.” Upon seeing Pops’ blank expression, he continued. “You know, those big white plastic boxes with that hazmat or biohazard or whatever sign on them? They blew one up. The stuff’s all in the air now. They say we’re gonna hafta be cleaned out by some special doctors and stuff so we don’t, like, grow a third arm or something.” The kid flashed Pops a smile, which the man returned with a lifted eyebrow.

Pops had been waiting for this to happen for many years now, as had most of the other experienced workers. Somehow it felt right. He could not deny it – he was relieved.

“Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?"

“We will reck his rod now, won’t we?” he whispered to himself. The younger man gave him a questioning look, but kept his peace for another moment.

“Hey, they say there’s gonna be an awesome sunrise because of all the radiation and chemicals and stuff. That’s why everybody’s still out here, waiting,” he added later.

Pops resigned himself to waiting with them. For nearly twenty minutes he stood, still, watching the shifting grey clouds, ignoring the men’s nervous chatter.

And then, there, the faintest pink on the horizon. The colour swelled with the minutes passing. Soon the full rainbow spectrum was dashed out across the sky. The vastness, the true, confounding gargantuan space above them, was lit with a hundred nameless colours in swathes and swipes as only ever seen on canvas. The stained shades like birds feathered and afloat in the clouds. Incandescent greens, pinks, oranges. Even crimson smudges huddled near the zenith. And each clear and loud and utterly unreal as if painted by the hand of God.

The God Pops had forgotten. The very one who sent him into the desert. Here, now, spreading the most glorious of images before his eyes. Nearly every man was moved to tears. Pops looked on, enraptured.

“And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

Bright wings, indeed. Pops knelt on the dust.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

He would not forget again.



* The original poem entitled "God's Grandeur", which was used in this short story, was written by Gerard Manley Hopkins.