A Poem Cycle After “The Bishop’s Wife”
PRELUDE ~ A Review in Verse
There are films that are prayers in disguise, candles flickering along reels of celluloid.
The Bishop’s Wife is one of them - an old black-and-white (though in the heart it gleams like gold leaf), where love is tested not by absence, but by too much heavenly attention.
There is a bishop who forgets mercy in his hunger to build a monument. There is a lonely woman named Julia whose joy once fit perfectly inside ice skates and a wool hat. There is a scholar, a taxi driver, a church that needs saving, an angel who looks like Cary Grant.
The message, the real one, is not about cathedrals at all. It is what Henry finally preached in his own voice: about the empty stocking that stands for faith, hope, love - and the God who fills it.
But what if the stocking remained empty? What if the angel, instead of vanishing, chose the woman with the human laugh?
What if love itself tempted Heaven?
I. DUDLEY SPEAKS
(the moment after the choice)
I was made of starlight once, a breath across the veil, sent to straighten the path of a man who prayed himself crooked.
But then she looked at me, - Julia - as though joy were a bell she remembered how to ring.
There is music in bread dough beneath warm hands, and snow melting in hair, and laughter forgotten by a marriage.
If Heaven asked why I lingered, I would have said: because she saw me.
And so I turned away from morning, placed my palm in hers ... and fell.
Not like lightning, not with a choir mourning, but softly, like a candle choosing to burn down just a little slower to watch the face beside it sleep.
II. JULIA
(rocking an infant under stained-glass moonlight)
His eyes are impossible - caught between sky and oak bark, a glimmer like someone remembering a star. When he laughs, something in the air stands up straighter, as if wings once beat there.
He smells like milk and something divine ... like midnight prayers half answered.
Henry does not ask whose child this is. He fears the truth, so he clings to silence.
And I? I hold my blessing tight, wrap him in secrets and baptism linens, kiss his head as though that alone could teach him heaven’s language.
Sometimes I whisper, “Your father loved the snow,” and the baby, as if knowing, smiles.
III. HENRY BROUGHAM
(the Bishop, sermon abandoned in an empty office)
God, I asked for guidance. You sent catastrophe with a charming smile.
The cathedral fund has stalled. The Widows of St. Timothy have taken their purses elsewhere. Even the choir boys snicker behind hymns.
My wife has found - not temptation exactly - but something more dangerous: wonder.
The angel stole my prayer, my purpose, my future, and left me a child who is not mine but forever will be.
I re-read the sermon I once meant to preach:
“Let us ask God not for grand things,
but for the courage to fill each empty stocking
with love.”
Yet who fills mine? The stocking hangs limp.
And Heaven? Heaven has gone silent.
IV. PROFESSOR WUTHERIDGE
(over a brandy bottle, books dusty around him)
I always said angels were trouble. Too perfect to trust, too polite to argue, too in love with miracles.
But I adored him, damn it. He listened to my ramblings about history and hope as though I were writing the future.
Now the future is here, and there’s a boy, and that boy’s laugh sounds like a library door swinging open.
I teach him Latin, and when he recites Gloria in Excelsis Deo,
something in my chest remembers flight.
V. SYLVESTER
(driving his cab through winter slush)
That fella - the smooth one - he tipped like he printed the money himself.
Used to say, “Let’s go where people forget they’re ordinary.” We’d drive to frozen ponds, and the lady - Julia - she’d skate until her troubles fell off her shoulders like old coats.
Now she walks everywhere. Says the exercise helps her think.
I swear the kid waves at pigeons like he expects them to salute back.
And sometimes, when they pass my cab, the air smells like the first snow of the year.
VI. THE CHURCH
(stones speaking into the night)
I was made to shelter worship - not ambition.
The bishop once paced my aisles muttering blueprints, praying for pillars, arches, a monument taller than faith.
But the angel cracked the foundation and left me raw, unfinished, aching.
Good.
Now candles flicker against bare walls. Footsteps echo louder, like a heart too big for its ribs.
There is room here for sorrow.
There is room here for a miracle that never came.
There is room here for truth.
VII. THE CHILD ~ DAVID
(years later, by the river ice)
Mother says my father loved the snow. Uncle Henry - I call him that now - says little of him, except that he was “needed in other places.”
But sometimes, when I pray alone, I hear wings like someone turning the page of a very old book.
I ask God: Was he punished for loving us?
The river answers: Ice breaks to let spring through. Heaven, too, must have its thaws.
A feather drifts onto my glove, frost-white, impossible.
I keep it hidden, close to my heart, like a promise.
CODA ~ WHAT THE ANGEL LOST, WHAT LOVE GAVE
Dudley walks now - no more vanishing through doors, no more tinkling bells announcing grace.
His shoes get wet, his heart bruises easily, and he laughs harder because of it.
Some nights he gazes upward, eyes longing to reopen the corridor of stars.
But Julia places her hand over the longing, and he stays.
Heaven does not call. Perhaps it grieves him. Perhaps it envies him.
Love is its own theology.
CHORUS
Not every stocking is filled. Not every prayer returns with an answer.
The bishop weeps sometimes, but in secret - God still loves him, though he cannot feel it yet.
Professor Wutheridge gets published again - a paper on angels disguised as metaphor.
Sylvester keeps change from strangers and hope from despair.
The child grows wise enough to forgive what he does not understand.
And Julia -
Julia dances again when it snows.
EPILOGUE ~ The Lesson I Consider
If an angel may fall for a woman who misses her own laughter, then perhaps salvation is not a ladder, but a circle -
love sent down
love chosen
love returned, imperfect
and holy enough.
THE PRICE OF FALLING
VIII. DUDLEY ~ The Reckoning
Some nights, joy becomes a knife.
Julia sleeps beside me - quiet, hands open like a surrender. Our son, chest rising like dawn, dreams in that innocent language only Heaven remembers.
But guilt hovers - a shadow with too many wings.
I taste it in the dark: the impossible sweetness of what I stole. Not salvation, no. I stole the better half of a man’s heartbeat.
Henry once prayed with such force that I was sent to steady him. Now he prays in silence, and silence answers back.
Every miracle costs someone their belief.
IX. JULIA ~ the Unspoken Confession
I love you, Dudley. And I loved him first.
Is that cruelty? Or simply the truth as it unfolds?
Some mornings I turn a corner and find Henry’s old robe still hanging in the closet, smelling faintly of lavender and sermons.
There are days I miss the click of his church shoes, the way he held books like they might evaporate without reverence.
I tell myself: I did not betray him. Love changed shape; I only followed.
But the heart knows its debts. When I kneel to pray, my knees shake.
X. BISHOP BROUGHAM ~ Career Change
They call me “Professor Brougham” now.
Business Ethics, Tuesdays and Thursdays. I teach young minds how not to become the very greed I once courted in marble and stained glass.
The chalk dust coats my fingers where a wedding band used to shine.
I still write sermons in margins of lecture notes:
"Faith is not a cathedral…
but the home we make
for each other’s sorrows.”
My students assume I’m divorced. It’s easier that way.
When Christmas comes, I avoid the church. The bells ring mockingly, not with praise, but memory.
XI. THE COMMUNITY ~ Reactions
Mrs. Hamilton’s clique whispered like prayer gone sour: “Angels or no, she should have stayed respectable.”
Choir boys misbehave now, left without the certainty that the divine is watching.
The Widows of St. Timothy choose knitting over charity, their needles clacking like tiny judgments.
A church without a shepherd is not a church - just echo and dust.
XII. PROFESSOR WUTHERIDGE ~ Private Counsel
Henry visits me sometimes, pretends it’s about curriculum.
We share brandy and what dignity remains.
He asks: “Did God punish me for ambition?”
I respond: “No, my dear. He punished you for loving someone who deserved a miracle.”
We clink glasses - a quiet toast to all the undone things.
XIII. SYLVESTER ~ Street Theology
I drive past the church at night - it’s dark more often than not.
People think sin is loud — but regret? That’s the real noise. It rustles through lives like newspapers blown down alleys.
Sometimes I pick up the kid from school - bright thing that he is.
He likes riding up front, hands on the dash, as if steering the whole city back toward grace.
I don’t have the heart to tell him adults get lost more often than taxis.
XIV. THE SON ~ Inheritance
When Father (the first one) sees me studying stars, his face folds ... part awe, part loss.
When Uncle Henry sees me pray, his eyes water, as if he remembers a conversation with Heaven that ended mid-sentence.
I am the sum of everyone’s ache, but also their hope.
It is heavy - and holy - to be loved this much.
XV. DUDLEY ~ Final Cost
I would choose her again, even knowing the cost.
But angels are made to protect joy, not consume it.
I feel Heaven’s absence like a missing rib - a gap where eternity once lived.
One night, when the wind through the trees sounds like a choir sobbing, I ask God:
Did I fail you?
The silence answers: You are still learning how to be human.
And that
may be atonement enough.
XVI. JULIA ~ Hope for the Wounded
I am not sorry, but I am not whole.
Two loves hold me, one past, one present, neither simple, both sacred.
If God is love, then maybe sin
is misunderstanding love’s many forms.
In the kitchen - flour on my palms, steam rising from fresh bread - I pray:
Let mercy be larger
than the rules we break
in pursuit of joy.
POSTSCRIPT ~ The One Stocking Still Empty
Christmas arrives again. The tree is smaller. The music quieter.
There is laughter… but thinner around the edges.
One stocking still hangs on the mantle - a reminder and a promise.
Henry’s name embroidered in gold thread.
No one dares move it.
Not even Dudley.
Especially not Dudley.
A Note from the Narrator
Love is not clean. Even the divine, when placed inside flesh and consequence, makes a mess.
But holiness sometimes grows best in what we struggle to forgive.
FURTHER CONSEQUENCES
XVII. DEBBY ~ A Friend’s Quiet War
(Julia pours tea as if peace could be steeped.)
I sit across from her, hands folded around the steaming cup, but the warmth doesn’t reach every cold corner inside me.
I saw how she laughed with him - that angel with theater-ticket charm. It woke a part of her that Henry had neglected.
But happiness taken
is different from happiness given.
I pray for the child - beautiful mystery that he is. I pray for the bishop, whose smile is now a winter coat worn too thin.
I pray for Julia, because love that breaks rules also breaks hearts - even the heart of the one who receives it.
I pray for Dudley…
but my voice catches.
Some prayers refuse hypocrisy.
XVIII. MRS. HAMILTON ~ Society’s Verdict
Oh, I know what people say: that I am stern, all checkbooks and charity banners.
But I saw the bishop’s collapse before anyone else did. Ambition is a fire - and we widows know what fire consumes.
When the angel arrived, I thought he was salvation. Instead, he was romance with feathers.
Now Julia is spoken about in quiet corners. The child is “unusual.” The bishop is a cautionary tale.
Even the church pews seem to shift away from blame.
Let Heaven mind its own business, I say.
And if angels truly fall, let them fall far from women who are already lonely.
XIX. BISHOP HENRY BROUGHAM ~ Bitterness Ferments
In the stillness of grading papers, my pen begins to shake.
Love does not leave gently. It tears - quietly, like fabric at the seam.
Dudley took what I prayed for. He wore charisma like vestments, bent miracles into a seduction I could never compete with.
Julia’s laughter now? It is not mine to cherish.
Her son? I love him, but he carries another man’s eternity in his eyes.
I cannot forgive an angel who played at being God.
And I hate that God allowed it.
XX. DUDLEY ~ A Conversation with Christ
There was a night, before flesh became my boundary, when I knelt before Him whose hands once bore the weight of humanity’s foolishness.
He asked two questions: Do you love her?
I answered yes.
Every star in creation dimmed.
Do you understand the price?
I answered no.
Every star went dark.
His silence then
was not judgment - but sorrow.
I was created to serve joy, not steal it.
Now I wake trembling. What is there after eternity is denied?
I miss music that only angels hear - that slow turning of the universe toward the heart of God.
I fear the day my borrowed grace runs dry.
I fear my son will look at me one morning and recognize the absence of light where wings once were.
XXI. JULIA ~ The Cost She Didn’t Expect
When Henry looks at me now, his eyes are windows with the curtains drawn.
I try to reach him - a hand on his sleeve, a soft joke - but shame is a river I cannot cross.
Love is never only joy. I know that now.
I chose Dudley with my whole heart - but a whole heart can still hurt the people it beats for.
XXII. THE CHILD ~ Inheritance of Heaven’s Silence
I once heard my father whisper a name he will not repeat - spoken like an ache: Immanuel.
I searched his face, hoping for the glow of divinity, but found instead a very human fear.
If angels can fall in love… can they also fall all the way down?
I ask God each night if He remembers us.
Sometimes I hear wind that sounds like wings, and it comforts me.
Other times, there is only silence.
A silence that feels like God closing a door too heavy for anyone to open again.
AN EPILOGUE
Love has expanded them -
and broken them.
Grace feels far away, but perhaps it has only changed shape: less like a cathedral, more like a flickering candle trying its best not to go out.
DOWNWARD CHORDS
XXIII. PROFESSOR WUTHERIDGE ~ The Eternal Bottle
It started so kindly, a bottle that poured joy like laughter in liquid form, never emptying, never condemning.
“Just a holiday trick,”
Dudley had smiled, and I toasted to angels
with a scholar’s naivete.
But grief seeks cracks, and the Sherry knew them all.
The first signs: books left unread, papers ungraded, a mind once polished now foggy like winter breath.
Students noticed - a trembling hand, a lecture lost mid-sentence.
I blamed the weather… then blamed time… then blamed nothing at all.
The bottle stays full, but I am not.
Miracles, it turns out, must obey physics: for every drop poured, something else evaporates.
My dignity, perhaps.
XXIV. BISHOP HENRY BROUGHAM ~ Rot in the Root
People speak of forgiveness like it’s bread you can break and share.
But I taste only bitterness, a fruit that grows unchecked once faith is uprooted.
I watch Dudley pass sometimes, son perched upon his shoulders like a small crown.
He nods politely, eyes ashamed of angels who cannot go home.
I do not return the gesture.
Once, I even wished him away - a curse upon his mortal walk. A terrible, silent prayer.
And when nothing happened, I was angrier still.
Not only did God let him steal my life - He also refuses to avenge me.
XXV. JULIA ~ The Weight of His Absence
Henry does not shout. He does not accuse.
He simply disappears room by room, until I share a house with a ghost who still breathes.
Our son asks why “Uncle Henry” sighs so much, why his eyes avoid the baby’s smile.
I lie. Because the truth would make him think love is a dangerous thing.
Yet I wonder: Am I the one who invited tragedy to Christmas dinner?
Every joy I take now has a shadow.
Sometimes Dudley brushes my cheek and the warmth hurts - because I remember the hands that used to bless me
with colder devotion.
XXVI. DUDLEY ~ Fading Grace
Once, Heaven lived in me like sunrise.
Now ... my prayers hit the ceiling and slide down like tears.
Christ’s face in that final meeting: disappointment sculpted into mercy - a look I cannot bear to remember, but cannot forget.
I feel my power thinning, like a wick burning too low. Miracles sputter.
I tried to help the Professor - but gifted him an addiction. I tried to strengthen a marriage - but carved a hollow in its heart. I tried to love Julia - and condemned Henry to a loneliness with no cure.
I was created to illuminate, yet I cast shadows deeper than night.
Tell me, Lord, where does an angel go when he is no longer welcome in Heaven or in prayer?
XXVII. THE CHILD - Inherited Doubt
Mother cries sometimes when she thinks the house sleeps.
Father (the second one - the one with the sorrowed wings) stares at the moon as though it remembers his name.
Uncle Henry drinks tea with the bitterness of a man who wanted wine.
The world feels ... tilted. Perhaps it always has been, but children notice when adults lie.
My heart kneels even when my legs do not.
I believe in God. But I fear His angels.
XXVIII. THE CHURCH ~ Abandonment
No footfall blesses my aisle. No candle warms my nave.
The pulpit crumbles, polished by no hands, ignored by no ears.
Some nights, I hear singing - but it is only the wind mocking what once was holy.
A house of God without a shepherd becomes a tomb.
And miracles unused turn to curses.
INTERLUDE - The Moral Fracture
Love, when taken by force of desire, ceases to be love.
Salvation, when denied “the least of these,” ceases to be salvation.
A single choice - warm as a hand held tight - can chill a lifetime if pulled from Heaven’s hearth.
XXIX. A Scene in Winter ~ Confrontation
Snow dusts the street - thin, icy lace under gaslight.
Henry and Dudley face each other outside the silent church, breath ghosting the air.
Henry whispers, “You took everything from me.”
Dudley answers, “I only wanted —”
“You wanted wrong.”
The snow listens, cold judge.
For the first time, Dudley cannot argue. He bows his head - not in prayer, but defeat.
Henry walks away, footprints deep, angry.
Dudley watches, knowing angels do not get second chances.
At least, fallen ones don’t.
Closing of This Movement
The tragedy is not loud. It unfolds like brittle pages turning, like hymns in minor keys, like stockings that stay empty year after year.
A miracle abused
is worse than no miracle at all.
Now every joy is haunted by the shape of what it displaced.
And love - oh love - wears the weight of eternity it broke.
EPILOGUE ~ A QUIET COLLAPSE
No more chapters -
just the slow erosion of memory.
The church crumbles
and is replaced by a parking lot.
The clergy names fade from plaques.
Sylvester’s cab is sold,
his stories forgotten.
Debby’s tea cools
on an undusted shelf.
Henry’s lectures are archived
and never opened.
Julia grows old
with the ache of a love
that cost her Heaven.
Dudley
forgets the feel of flight,
and one day
stops looking up.
The child grows,
silent about feathers
once found in winter.
The miracle that broke them
becomes nothing more
than a rumor
lodged in the cracks
of a demolished neighborhood.
Time erases
what grace refused
to bless.
Closing Words
Not all stories sanctify.
Not all love is salvation.
Sometimes the divine,
when mishandled,
burns.
And as centuries pass,
what was once magnificent
collapses into
the anonymity of time:
Two discarded wings,
flattened by snow.
A stocking
never filled.
And in Heaven -
no one speaks
his name.
END
A tragedy of love misapplied.
A prayer that never returned.
A miracle that cost too much.
GBS
2023
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