What if Bede had seen it in reverse?
If the warmth, the safety and the home
were not the banqueting hall at all,
companionable and redolent of food,
but the before and the after were the light,
with the in between more akin
to Sartre’s hell is other people or Platonic shadows,
or at least less salubrious,
this gap we call life,
than the unknown previous
and the yet to be viewed postscript.
All of which sounds at first a bit grim,
but if true means we are intent on the light
and winging our way to Tabor dazzle.
