We lie through the blood of the dog

                                                by Heleanor Feltham

The icon painter

Lazarus the icon painter

Senior among the artists of Byzantium

Caught God in wood and gold

And filled the courts, churches and monasteries

With choirs of angels.

But there were those who said

The infinite could never be confined

Within the circuit of a golden frame -

Not even in the glittering tesserae

Of the great dome.

How can the living Word express itself

Through the dead medium of glass and paint?

(And when the hanging lamps supply the light

Through coils of blue-sweet smoke, and incense hangs

And shimmers in the air,

How easy to suppose the image smiles

And moves within a cloud of miracles.)

So Lazarus was branded on both palms

And scourged, and stigmatised;

Anathema cried out against him.

Those who would steal a part in God’s creation

Must also suffer in His crucifixion.

……But when they smashed the glittering reliquary

Did God hatch from the icon like an egg?

Drinking the blood of the dog

Ref: Theophilacti Bulgariae archiepiscopi in  Fontes Graeci Historiae Bulgaricae, Sofia 1963, 6: 31

When Leo V, Byzantine emperor,

Devious pragmatist, local boy made good,

Wary iconoclast,

Met with the young Khan Omurtag to sign

A treaty giving thirty years of peace,

They swore by Bulgar custom on each other’s gods

To seal the bargain.

Leo killed a dog,

And raising one hand filled with grass to heaven

He drank its blood. The chronicle does not say

What Christian oath Khan Omurtag declaimed.

Dogs, nomad people think, prefigure us.

They are the unborn human generations

Come here to sniff the landscape; fugitive,

They monitor our contracts.

And how they live with us comes back to haunt us

On the other side of a new incarnation.

A generation of the dispossessed,

Abandoned and abused

Darkens the sun.

Those who receive our love,

Fire suns to harvest.

Dogs who are valued, and whose lives are lived

Within the frame of mutual obligations

May be cut short when need is absolute.

Dogs, on the whole, deal honestly with us.

Out of a primal, bright-eyed innocence,

An honoured sacrifice will take our vow

Swiftly as wind through grass

And bring our words

To lie in the hands of God like a thrown stick.

And the dog within will see our treacheries.

Leo did not live long. His death

Was cinematic.

In the shallow pre-dawn dark of a Christmas morning

With the rows of chanting monks and the incense rising,

And rings of lamps reflected off white walls

As clear of images as snow,

And even the emperor singing in a voice

More used to moving armies,

His assassins moved

Out from among the monks.

And Leo fell,

Wielding the abstract gold cross like a club

Against the sudden violence of death.

Cut down, his blood spilt over holy ground,

No sainted stony eyes to follow his,

No numinous shimmering surfaces to haunt

And echo in the night;

Only the betraying purple and the feral dog

At the heart of things.

We spin out empty words in the hollow air;

Sending a message to the yet unborn

Of doubt, mistrust and fear.

We lick our lips and lie through the blood of the dog.