“From the Wound a Lovely Flower Grew”

The other night while driving, this lyric sort of knocked me off balance a bit:

He looked beneath his shirt today,

There was a wound in his flesh so deep and wide;

From the wound a lovely flower grew

From somewhere deep inside.

It comes from an album I have always loved — Sting’s Nothing Like the Sun — but for some reason this song (“Lazarus Heart”) moved me in a new way.

Once the song’s main character discovered his wound, 

He turned around to face his mother

To show her the wound in his breast that burned like a brand;

But the sword that cut him open

Was the sword in his mother’s hand.

Apparently this wound was inflicted by an unexpected assailant. But the sword-stroke was not ultimately intended by his mother to destroy, but to strengthen and produce life (hence the flower growing from it):

Though the sword was his protection,

The wound itself would give him power:

The power to remake himself

At the time of his darkest hour.

 

She said the wound would give him courage and pain,

The kind of pain that you can’t hide;

But from the wound a lovely flower grew

From somewhere deep inside.

Of course, the unexpected strength and subsequent joy we receive in times of pain can have many sources. It could be God, it could be “mother Mary [who] comes to me” (as sang one Beatle), or our cry for aid may be to our actual earthly mother (as demonstrated another). 

Or (and call me simplistic) it may be the case that, “at the time of our darkest hour,” the giver of the flower that grows from our burning flesh could take on a less archetypal and mythological form. It could be something as ordinary as a friend, a neighbor, a new lover, or an unlooked-for confidant who drops out of the sky as a welcome surprise.

Ah, feck. See what I did there? On the one hand this welcome surprise is “ordinary” and takes some common, human form. But on the other it “drops out of the sky” like a being from some otherworldly and mythical place. (Hey, I’m a Catholic. I have a hard enough time keeping heaven and earth unmixed, so don’t start with me about my metaphors.)

Beauty can come from ashes, is what I’m saying. And sometimes, if we look up from our misery and pay even a little bit of attention, we may find that something wonderful is right down the road. . . .