Small child running

 Sitting in my customary place outside in the sunshine in the cafe area of the swimming pool that I go to for my morning swim, my chosen table gives me a view of everybody taking their drinks.

There are not that many people there in the early morning, but as the school holidays have started here in Catalonia, there is a steady stream of parents dropping off their children at the Sports Centre for the 'activities' that will keep their kids occupied for the entire day - with meals provided: I've seen the price list and it is good value childcare with healthy exercise thrown in!

Today was the first Monday of the holidays and there were more people than usual so that the tranquility of my 'writing' area was broken by children in various stages of development bein led away by the Tecnics to start their sports.

Apart from one small boy who was vocally unenthusiastic about being left in the centre, most of the kids were keen and some were almost endearing as they marched about clutching racquets that were almost as tall as they were.

But two children caught my eye, a pretty little girl with long flowing hair and her smaller and very much younger brother.  She had an excess of energy and positively swooped around the place, and she was quick on her feet - which was the starting point of the poem.

My mother used to swear that, when I was very young, as soon as I could move, I did.  Whether it was crawling or walking, I was capable of tangential exploration in an instant.  Eventually my parents invested in reins and were so able to contain my infantile wanderlust.

It was the speed of the girl and the realization that she could be somewhere else, anywhere else in seconds that brought back my mother's words and, of course, my mother's fear of my getting lost.

Children do get lost of course, both literally and figuratively, and not only when they are children.  How do parents cope with those,

                       vast circumferences

              beyond parental care

 

that are the normal course of parent/children relationships?

The final image is one that feels right to me, though I do not think that I can fully explain why.

 

 

Small child running

 

“I had to watch you all the time.

A second?  You were gone!”

 

That leitmotiv of memory recalled,

my mother’s words, repeated chorus-like

throughout my life

as I grew up,

and grew away,

came back to me as

 

who knows her age?

- but very young.

Her brother barely out of totter-walk

(and flat-cap-headed

looked a dwarfish drunk)

as smooth agility is almost,

just not yet, within his reach.

 

His sister moves through air

as if like water, thin,

impeding nothing, giving grace

to her loose liquid stretch.

 

And she has speed!

She weaves her brother round,

and runs a path as random as her will.

 

Few seconds pass,

and she is half-a-care away.

 

Some seconds more

and she could be

 

            beyond our sight.

 

The gate is open.

There’s a busy road.

 

Eye-contact pleasantries with friends

is time enough for her to vanish

from her mother’s sight

 

to the indifferent world,

where predatory cars and Men

will stop her run.

 

The energy that stretches,

snaps, the apron strings,

that drags the radii

to vast circumferences

beyond parental care

 

must be a death of sorts.

 

 

For whom?

 

Flesh of my flesh.

I think of bees:

the sting, the pain, the end.

"Significance" Poem 8 from "A slur of tense"

 

“Significance”   Poem 8 from “A slur of tense”

 

I still forget my mask when I leave the house sometimes – it just goes to show that some habits require more than the year and a bit that we have been wearing them.  I compensate for my forgetfulness by storing a stock of clean masks in the glove compartment of the car.

Even though it is not strictly (or it didn’t used to be) necessary to wear a mask when exercising I always wear mine when I go out on my bike.  This allows me to feel smug and to hiss “Covidiota!” under my breath when I pass those miscreants who are maskless, because

now (apart from smokers!!?) all must wear masks, even on the beach!

The weather this month has not been very good and there has been little incentive for people to make the trip to the seaside to stare at a sea which is reminiscent of the colder waters of the north than the usually sparkling blue Med.  Still, Spanish people do love a Paseo and they will walk to see and to be seen no matter what the weather.

Spanish and Catalan people are much more demonstrative than their British counterparts: they kiss and they hug and they touch.  All the things that the pandemic orders you not to do.  There have been many discussions about how to greet people to keep true to the Iberian need for contact, but also to keep to the Covid rules.  This means that there is an ostentatious display of Covid rectitude but, having displayed the correct behaviour, there is an assumption that such rule keeping allows a more tactile rule breaking!

People are fed up with restrictions, they want things to be as they were and, as we build up to summer, there is going to be trouble as people want to go to the beach, to sunbathe, to swim to have a good time.

And the percentage of the country that has been vaccinated is woefully small and no one (absolutely no one) believes the government when they say that 70% of the population will have been injected by the end of the summer (no one!)

What people are not thinking about is the part that the church plays in their lives.

Although Spain and Catalonia are Roman Catholic countries, they are not devout church going Roman Catholics.  In Catalonia the recent history of the Roman church is not a supportive one and there is a dislike of institutionalised religion.

In this part of the world, the sea has a greater pull than the clergy!

 

Significance

 

 

Fitful sun through broken cloud.

The weather is indifferent.

Not true domingueros lure –

and they can’t travel from ‘outside’.

The Covid map is ‘firmly’ set –

though conscience gerrymanders all.

 

And we’ve rethought our boundaries,

including ones we didn’t note

until they were decreed away –

or strictly reinforced.                                         

 

The British sorry-pardon-ex-cuse-me

is truly foreign hereabouts;

while proxy greetings Covid force,

(formal efforts, elbow-bumps)

are followed by instinctive touch,

a hand on shoulder or on arm

that fatal virus can’t restrain.

 

The paseo’s fairly full,

for who dislikes a seaside walk

in Spring and during holiday?

 

Domestic walls must pall with time,

and yearning for the natural,

with vistas wider than the street,

becomes a hunger then a lust.

 

Except, this is a construct too –

the walk is paved with concrete flags.

The vegetation on the fringe,

selected, not by wind-blown chance.

The beach is truly engineered,

its profile takes some maintenance,

I’ve seen equipment making it.

 

My morning bike ride’s crooked course

winds its way through dogs on leads,

runners, walkers, those stopped still,

respecting fleeting human space.

Even though my bike’s bright red

and I’m not inconspicuous,

some people find it difficult to judge

that I am not pedestrian,

and so, despite it being day,

I keep my shining, front light on,

to make the difference obvious.

 

My ride complete.

I realize that nothing on the way,

has made this Easter more, or less,

than any other day,

when those who could,

came to the sea.

 

 

 

 

"Hollow" Poem 7 from "A slur of tense"

 

“Hollow”   Poem 7 from “A slur of tense”

 

When I was young I used to accompany my mother to part of the three-hour service on Good Friday.  The hymns were the times when the old wooden door of our church St Augustine’s in Rumney in Cardiff and people could leave or enter for one of the mini services that made up the content of the three hours that Christ was on the cross.

As I got older and actually listened to the sermons and felt more involved in the detail of the theology, I built up to attending all three hours of the service.  I was a server and I remember one occasion when I read alternate verses of the Penitential Psalms with the vicar, saying I seem to recall some awful things about myself with the sonorous voice that I knew carried well in our church!

The bleakness of our church with all pictures and images covered in cloth, no flowers and the altar stripped back to its wooden form remains with me – as a dramatic contrast to the church on Easter Day resplendent with flowers, not only in the church, but also replenished in the grave vases outside.

 

Easter eggs were always a bit of a problem.  All of my family liked chocolate, but all of us felt that we were being ripped off by the way that Easter eggs were packaged and sold.  They were a confidence trick, and one we fell for every year.  The little packets of sweets inside the hollow eggs would have made even Ryan Air ashamed to offer customers.  They were never good enough to justify the price or the expectation.

 

The poem pushes the metaphor of the Easter egg and tries to emphasise the acceptance of something like fraud, but still looking for a truth in spite of its deception.

 

Day 7 Holy Saturday

 

Hollow

 

 

A nothing day in Holy Week – the Saturday.

Set between Good Friday’s drab

and sugar rush of Easter Day.

 

When younger, I saw nothing good

in Friday’s sombre, sackcloth, plain,

that covered paintings, statues, art,

inside our barn-like, local church;

mourning death, remote yet near,

and freshly dead each punctual year. 

Altar bare to wooden frame:

I’d not accepted “Less is More”

as my aesthetic just quite then,

a bit of bling could please my eye.

 

As I grew older, Easter Eggs

were difficult to see as fair –

“Air and silver foil and space,” my father said. 

“You’re better off with chocolate bars,” he said.

 Which sort-of missed the festive point.

 

Each year (like UK August’s “sunniness”)

you trusted “sweet-filled” to be right.

The meagre contents of the bag,

inside the egg, showed once again

that commerce mocked your willing faith.

 

But the next year, you re-believed.

It really must be true this time!

The box so colourful, aglow,

with bright, compelling lettering,

graphics you could almost taste!

 

The Egg, behind a plastic screen

(that only scissors could get through)

serene, inviolate – inviting too.

 

And then, reality. 

And, once again,

the shell so thin, the contents sparse,

emptiness re-emphasised.

“You’re paying for the packaging,” my Dad.

 

And yet, there was a sweetness left

impossible to disregard.

 

Enough, at least, to keep you firm, 

hoping in succeeding years,

that something, somewhere might be true.

 

 

"Camino" Poem 6 from "A slur of tense"

 

“Camino”  Poem 6 from “A slur of tense”

 

My starting point for the whole series of Poems In Holy Week writing weeks that I have done was seeing that Holy Week meant little or nothing to the majority of people here in Castelldefels.  They were days in a holiday week, little more.

To be truthful, in spite of the fact that I draft a poem a day during succeeding Holy Weeks, year after year, the week means little to me apart from an annual time for introspection and observation.

The one point in the week which is specific for me is Good Friday, when I make the effort to call into a church.  Sometimes it has only been for seconds, but I do call in.  In the poem I make a snide reference to “the lees of Christianity”, the dregs of something long since drunk that leads me to church on this particular day – but even in that image, there is a recognition that I have imbibed something from “the faith I held for twenty years”.

In Roman Catholic churches the OTT decoration and the gruesome crucified Christs are easy for an Anglican Atheist like myself to reject, as I shudder with Protestant-Puritan repugnance to glib sacred overstatement – but I do go to church every year, so there must be something that clicks in my being with that action.

Perhaps it’s trying to discover exactly what that ‘click’ is that is the point.

 

Day 6 Good Friday

 

Camino

 

 

There is no sense today’s significant.

The hazy sun will bring the crowds,

but they are for the beach and not the pews.

 

My swim complete, my Earl Gray drunk,

I start my ‘pilgrimage’: the Camino

I make each year, punctiliously, today.

Good Friday.  Every year.

 

Maybe, it’s lees of Christianity,

the faith I held for twenty years,

that sump in corners of my godless soul,

and prompt my searchings out.

 

Whatever!

 

For as long as I recall,

I call into a church today.

This year, it’s three I’ve set myself.

By bike.  To walk would be impossible;

by car, a tad mechanical.

 

I’m conscious that my impulses

are not entirely ‘pure’,

by which I mean,

I do not have an ‘open heart’.

I start with preconceived ideas:

of seeing only ‘faithful’ few;

the old, irrelevant, and out of step;

settings gaudy with their painted dolls.

What bishops of the Catholic Church

have jumped the queue to get their jabs?

How paper thin is wordy faith

when daily life brings daily death?

 

That sort of thing. 

 

A pen alert for irony.

Contempt, an easy throw.

 

 

1         Església Nostra Senyora Verge de l’Carme

 

A squirt of gel, I take my seat and watch

a verger fumbling over mics,

two for lecterns, one handheld.

Congregation, under ten,

contained by brutal concrete walls

within whose splay a Mary stands

Baroque, frumpish and Glorious.

And to her left the wooden death.

Participation is the key, with laity

assuming roles of reader, acolyte and cross.

Though not before some whispered checks,

hand signs, instructions, and false starts,

to give a casual, impromptu air

to mark The Stations of the Cross.

 

 

2         Església de Santa Maria

 

There’s no East Window in the church,

the walls are fresco, giddily trompe l’oeil,

to supercharge the dearth of glass,

with detail guaranteed to catch

attention wandering.  From where I sit:

a goat surveys a parrot, prone.

We are together in the aisle,

the nave too great a space to fill,

our numbers well below the Covid rules.

The tabernacle gleams in light,

a model of the Aedicule,

and priestly centre of concern 

preparing for some other thing

that doesn’t seem to count us in.

Telephones and outdoor sounds

noise the sanctity away.

 

 

3         Església Nostre Senyora de Montserrat

 

Silence.

 

Except for noises off:

stomping, irascible old man

shouting at his mobile phone

while waiting for a bus outside.

 

A lurid life-sized crucifix

dominates the sanctuary.

An idol preens upon the right

with live and kneeling worshiper.

 

The rest of us all sit and wait

as though we’re in a Beckett play.

 

Phone music jars.

Glissando from another phone.

Bell-pull thumps to tinkle out the hour:

The Twelfth.

 

The Crucifixion starts.

 

Another phone goes off.

A dog barks. 

This is Spain.  Dogs always bark.

 

Nothing happens.

 

And I have had enough.