XXIV
CHERUBIM-BOOK

You are Eagle and Man, Lion and Bull           Ezekiel 10:14.
the Sphinx, the Cherubim of our fate.
And only by deciphering your parables
can we, poor mortals,
live with love. Because you are
the eternal book of five seals
wrapped around the cross, which
is printed with letters of blood on leaves
of spotless parchment taken from
the depths of your body, and which
can only be read by love. Your whiteness
is sprinkled with bloody enigmas;
for the world’s vain understanding
it is only a source of blind skepticism,
and your cross is a source of scandal.
No one in heaven or on earth           Revelations 5:3.
(nor beneath it) could open the book:
only love can open it with red blood.
Only love is able to use the five
keys which decipher its whiteness.
When you died on the cross, heaven
was opened like a book, a book of flesh,
and the Word that created said to us:
“Take this book and eat it; if it is bitter
for the stomach, it will be sweetness and honey
in the mouth.” And this book is You.
The book is alive, it is Master, and its death
gives the lesson it has printed with its blood,
not a lesson of words puffed up by the wind,
but the supreme lesson of eternal life!