Howard Jones’ ‘No one is to blame’
pipes through a café in Mullingar
in the beat and thrust of electronified
syncopation. Am I the only one here
stopping for coffee and a blueberry muffin,
reflecting on Rembrandt’s painting
of a sun-deprived, grey-jaundiced

Jesus nailed to a pitch-singed cross
of cheap carpentered wood? Where within
the frame of shrouded silence he realises
his own abandonment, his fear-paralysed
eyes and gnarled screaming mouth tasting
the anguish of hope lost; this same cry
unheard in the agonised etching in an earlier

self-portrait wherein we too become
the Dutchman who has surely painted
the symbol of man as artist forsaken
between speech and dumbness, between
a God absent and the brittle belief in a
rolled-back stone and an empty tomb.

His Christ hangs bereft at our casual forgetfulness,
our walled-out emptiness now brimmed with
desires unfulfilled, and spent treasure wasting.
Is he with us now watching out for Summer Sales,
avoiding supermarket trolleys, this café filling
with shoppers and wandered-souls,
heedless of piped music in relentless loop?