POEMS IN HOLY WEEK viii. Easter Sunday - United

This is the final poem in the sequence and in it I have tried to address some of the questions that seem important on this particular day.
          Once again, I found myself in the local leisure centre with notebook and pen to help me make sense of my responses to what I have been writing (I wonder if what I write would be different if I made my notes before my swim rather than after!)
          I think that it is probably obvious my now that my relationship with religion and specifically Christianity is not as simple as an atheist observing something totally foreign.  I am particularly sensible that I was brought up as an Anglican, was a practising church goer until my late twenties and I retain warm memories of the church and particularly of the literature of the Bible and The Book of Common prayer.
          Although I find Philosophy a difficult discipline I do try and read about it (even if I rarely read the actual works by philosophers) and religion is an essential component in such a study - even if you are rejecting it!
          I suppose that what I say in the final stanza of this poem, 'struggle is the vital way' is my attempt to find common ground, and to give the sequence some form of ending.  I do not think that any form of ethos is capable of giving complete reassurance about 'truth' and so intellectual engagement about what it might mean is a life long preoccupation for which our allotted span is far too short!  Which should mean another sequence next year!

Poems in Holy Week

viii.     Easter Sunday – United

All Easter Days in memory

have sun to brighten that

short walk from porch to lych;

along graves bright with

dying blooms; returning affirmations

of belief with mild, polite, unease.

While here and now, I watch

the greening trees, earth-islanded

in sunken circles in the dry cement.

As football, basketball, petanque

play on; with tea and coffee, beer and Coke.

And no one wishes anyone a Happy Day. 

And I’ve not gone to church,

again, this year.

It’s not the birth –

though that was odd enough –

or precocity, or even

the odd miracle (peculiar

things turn out to be quite

ordinary with passing time)

it is the central ‘fact’

on which the church is built

(that he rose from the dead)

that loses me.

We know that those

who make no claims about

their lives, die everyday.

And some by drugs, AR,

electric shocks and luck

come back to life – but,

this is not the same.

And those apologists who

juggle plausibility to make

miraculous mundane,

do no real service to their creed.

Some things in life are hard to take

and struggle is the vital way: 

for those with faith – and not.

I will print a Chapbook of this sequence of poems which I will send  (via email) to anyone who is interested, as long as they promise to respond with comments - and as long as they provide me with an email to send it to!