If they believed as through a cloud
or through the mist, tenaciously
clinging onto prodigious light
and glimpses of the city through
the haziness of law and death;
If they lay like Jacob on
their deathbeds, prophesying of
what great lions would grow from
the children he had raised and how
Egypt soon would fade to Canaan;
If they fell like Moses on
that other side of Jordan with
the hope that hope though now deferred
was only rivers from fulfillment,
though they never saw hope’s towers;
Do we who live on the right side
of the law’s now lifting veil
fall like Simeon and Anna, say:
Now dismiss us, Lord, Your servants;
we have now seen our salvation?
The Consolations of Writing 