Jamie Grant: The Hand of God

The Hand of God

The building-site crane arches high over the highway like a footbridge.

A full-rigged

sailing ship could pass beneath it. Cement mixing trucks pause

in its shadows

—hatched and striped—with drums revolving slowly

like a ball idly

spun from hand to hand, or like the chambers

of a revolver

in a game of Russian roulette. Wearing luminous jackets

and white helmets

workmen swarm over the scaffolding as ants clamber

all over

an animal’s corpse. At ground level, on a public road,

there are dead-eyed

young women holding up paddles to advise us STOP or SLOW.

It looks somehow

as if the crane’s extended beam is being held out toward

a second

crane on a  neighbouring building plot, reaching

as on the Sistine ceiling

the hand of God stretches toward a new creation

that is a naked man.

Jamie Grant