PIHW 8 Easter Sunday - Waiting

As a teacher the date of Easter is important.  It determines the length of the spring and summer terms.  It makes preparation for examinations difficult as terms are not equal.  The Easter holidays can be too soon or too late, they are rarely just right.  And the school year is determined by the date of Easter, in spite of the fact that the majority of the population is not really interested in the importance of the festival, just concerned about the holidays.

     I realize that the date of Easter has been of paramount importance in the history of theology.  People have lost their lives over the question of when it should occur, and Easter is still celebrated at different times depending on the denomination of the faith that you hold.

     Most people would unhesitatingly say that Christmas is the most important Christian festival, and they would be wrong: rising from the dead, the resurrection, is the central tenet of the Christian faith, but how many people see the festival as a justification of eating Cadbury Cream Eggs rather than confessing the faith of Christ crucified and the rising from the dead?  Well, let it pass.

     The following poem started with a few thoughts about the date of Easter, The Golden Number in its computation and the difficulties about its moveable nature.

     Our neighbourhood is not a very demonstrative one, so the sudden explosion of sound in the early afternoon as the people in an adjacent street decided to have a sort of segregated roof party was surprising.  I incorporated this ‘event’ into the final poem.

     Of all the Easter Day poems that I have written in my series of Poems in Holy Week, this one is the most bitter.  Usually there is a sort of wistfulness about the day, with a twitch of lost faith to enliven things, but this poem felt different.  It may well be that the extraordinary circumstances surrounding this Easter with the lockdown because of Covid-19 has fed into the response as well.

 

 

Waiting

At times like this,

the vague absurdity of honouring

a festival, date-anchored by the moon,

and at the culmination of a week

that people generally ignore,

is little less than sad.

Put aside irony

of dressed-up priests

in vacant naves

with pious platitudes

that do not, cannot save,

and you have emptiness.

The tomb.  The body politic.

When will salvation come?

Today the sky was overcast.

The sun did shine,

but fitfully.  It was not cold,

but breezes were uncomfortable.

A holiday.  But just in name.

A day like all the other days

within unstructured weeks

inside the walls.

Outside, the sort of bass,

and at a volume that

reverberates in floors and bones

of music with a beat and

nondescript and nothing that I knew

from terraces in an adjacent street.

And there were flags and some balloons

and masks (but not of carnival design)

and people dancing in comparted space

with neighbours on the far side of the road.

And then, at last, The Bee Gees,

even I could recognize.

And shouts and claps from streets

and streets away and then,

almost too aptly,

“We are fam-ah-lee” blared out,

and everyone who I could see:

the children round the pool ahead

the parents on the tennis court;

people gardened back and front;

the terraced folk on lofty roofs,

moved or tapped in harmony

of sorts.  As near a celebration

we are like to get.  For now.

PIHW 7 Holy Saturday in Holy Week - I know what I believe

A badly played electric organ (probably a desperate attempt by a parent to amuse a stir crazy child) wafted into the bathroom and started me thinking.  It was the tune that was being played that interested me, “Greensleeves” – not a particularly remarkable tune, but it seemed slightly odd to hear something so associated with my home country here in Castelldefels.   

     Of course, it is just a well-known tune, and something that electric organs could have pre-programmed inside them, but the ‘arrangement’ if it could be called that that accompanied the inexpertly played melody was anything but traditional or indeed pleasant.   

     My mind drifted to Henry VIII, the golden prince who became the monster king and the belief that he wrote the tune.  I knew that many experts have called such an attribution into question, but Henry VIII was the first thing I thought of when I heard the tune.   

     The belief that Henry wrote the tune is one of those bits of knowledge that you want to be true, like the equestrian statues: if the horse has all four legs on the ground the rider died in his bed; one foot up he died of wounds; two feet in the air and he (it’s usually a he isn’t it?) died in battle.  Not true, but you want it to be true.  At least I do.

     Anyway I played around with the idea of “Greensleeves” and Henry having written it for Ann Boleyn when he was trying to bed her, and linked it in my mind with the statistics that we are daily assailed by.  I have seen more graphs of deaths and infection for individual countries and comparing countries than I think is healthy.  They all look frightening and if they don’t we assume they are lies!

     “Greensleeves”! may not have been written by Henry VIII, and not for Ann Boleyn, but Ann Boleyn lived and died, she was executed by a single stroke of an imported French executioner’s sword.  That was real and true.

     The poem uses ideas of presentation and truth, it responds to the games that we play with evidence, but it ends with the reality of mortality, “And blood.”!

 

 

I know what I believe

Choose your axes; choose your scale;

the colours, thickness of your lines,

and you can show just what you want

and always claim that it is fact.

Mere figures are too bare, too bald –

you need a narrative to link the scraps

and make them fit for taking in.

Machine-like and anaemic sound,

incongruous, but quite distinct,

from way beyond the pine trees’ gloom,

and through the bathroom window’s dust

to me, and unmistakably, “Greensleeves”

picked out, unsteady, note by note,

above insistent electronic bass;

bastardized indeed, but still

a quintessential Englishness,

exotically, beside the Med.

The randy, monstrous, Tudor king

eying Wilshire’s daughter Ann,

a maid of honour to his queen,

tried to woo her with this song

the story goes. 

Fake News!

The style and evidence suggest

a later, and another reign.

But, tradition has it so,

and that, for most, is quite enough

without the inconvenient truth

to spoil that which we have been told.

A fairy tale? 

Well, all of us like fairy tales.

Perhaps.

But, there was a straightened neck;

an executioner’s sharp sword,

and a beheading at the end.

And blood.

PIHW 6 Good Friday in Holy Week - Church visiting

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me as an atheist, I make a real effort to visit a church on Good Friday.  I do not stay for a service and sometimes my visit is fleeting, but I feel a need to visit a church on Good Friday. 

     This year because of Covid-19 and the lockdown visiting a church was impossible.  And I surprised myself by how much I felt the loss. 

     As I always describe myself as an Anglican Atheist it is easy to suppose that my desire is a nagging fag-end of the faith that I once had trying to get me back.  But I truly do not think that this is so.  I am comfortable with my atheism, but I am equally comfortable with accommodating my knowledge of the Bible and the liturgy of the Anglican Church together with Hymns Ancient and Modern, a smattering of Christian theology and the history of religion, knowledge of the Lives of the Saints and their depiction in art, and a working knowledge of Church Architecture!  A chunk of my cultural background in grounded in Christianity and is an essential part of who I am, but I simply do not have the Christian Faith.

     I am also aware of the “methinks he doth protest too much” argument which avers that my very avowal of atheism masks my essential faith in Christianity.  I think not, but I have friends who are totally convinced by such an assessment.

     I feel comfortable in churches, but especially in smaller, older, more restrained Anglican churches like Saint Augustine’s in Rumney, which is a solid barn-like building with fewer of the gory Baroque excesses of Roman Catholic decoration.  But I do get some satisfaction from churches that are far from my parochial ideal.

     So, in the following poem I have tried to express what I feel about the fact that I have broken the tradition of visiting a church on Good Friday and I also try to address a part of what I feel that I do when I write.

Church visiting

Dexterity for me is

jabbing, interrupted glide

across and up and down

well-polished keys.

My fingers feel for words,

they know where letters are

without my thought,

and thus I draw my pictures

without pen,

my comfortable places:                               

book-lined walls,

a well-placed lamp,

a polished-sturdy desk,

a back-supporting chair,

a white-clear screen.

Is all.  I tell myself.  I need.

And yet.  Today I am denied.

Today I go to church.

To any church.

Only for moments.

For one day in the year.

Today’s the day.  Today.

It’s what I do.

But I’m to house confined.

And now I find

that all my fingers can

in conjuring a place, the sounds,

the smells, the feel of pews,

the gleam of glass, the statues’

glassy stares, the shuffles of

the Others there, are not enough.

I am not there.  Enough.

My words are not enough.

I need a ‘there’.

Because I want to take

and not to give.  Today.

One day to take.

And I have been denied,

more than a day.

PIHW 5 Maundy Thursday - Choice

Sometimes you feel that you are living through important times, life-changing times – and sometimes you are.  I do not have a World War as part of my memory and those times where the world has allegedly changed I did not feel that I was an integral part of that process.  It was as if the change was something important that was going on outside my everyday experience and it could be relayed to me by television and the press, dressed up by columnists informing me about how the days we were living through were significant; I could read about it in books later and see the historic period that I had daydreamed through in its proper context.

     The 3-day week; the Miners’ Strike; The Falklands Conflict; The Cold War; wars various and international; the EU; Brexit; The Financial Crash and all the other events.  I went on working and getting paid.  What really changed?

     One feels that Covid-19 is something that must (surely) make a lasting difference.  People have died.  The whole of our way of life has been disrupted.  Our political masters have been at best inept and at worst criminally culpable.  Things cannot be the same after the crisis is over.  Or can they?

     The poem today considers memory and how we deal with it.  The horrific journey I made from Turkey to Wales in the 1980s was one that I swore I would never smile about; it was just too awful to be softened by time into something acceptable.  But it was so softened and has become something I can look back on and remember with affection.

     I am not saying that the present crisis is going to be something that we can look back on and smile, though I am sure that there will be funny aspects of it for individuals – as long as they survive.  And it is that survival that is a crucial aspects of the crisis.

     We are all involved in the crisis because we are in lockdown.  But I don’t know anyone who has had the virus and I therefore don’t know anyone who has died.  Every day we have statistics that point out the numbers of the infected around us and the number of the dead – but none of them are those we know.  So the crisis is real and at the same time unreal.  We believe what we are told but have no experience of what the statistics say.  So how, eventually, will we look back on this time.

     As we are literally in the middle of the crisis (geographically and statistically) we have a long way to go before hindsight can come into play.  But the poem speculates now.

 

 

 

Choice

I told myself I’d never smile

when I recall what I endured

on foot, by car, in taxi, plane and bus

to get from Turkey back to Wales:

English swearing, foul-mouthed scrum;

threatened Tarom Airway clerk;

German, shouting, lost it, gone;

Russian wanting to defect;

Cyclist, Czech with eyes on West;

baying crowds for Tarom blood!

Details thump back as I think

with anger, pain and disbelief.

But let the narrative go hang

on spoken scraps that I can list:

“The plane is full!  Join other queue!”

“There might be.  Another one.”

“No pounds!  No dollars!  Only lei!”

“Do you drink Vodka, and with Coke?”

“What?  London flight is gone!  Is gone!”

“Calmo!  Calmo!  Calmo!”

“An hour, or maybe two – who knows?”

“This ticket doesn’t get a seat.”

But I’m chuckling as I write,

the nightmare gentled into tale.

But.

Some memories will always hurt

beyond the smile of edited recall,

because it’s simply right they should.

Sharpness blunts with time, they say,

but the unwary, careless thought

can snag and rip the opening wound

(that never, ever, really healed) and

the old lemon’s squeezed again

in open eyes that bring the brine

to soak away the stubborn stains

hid out of sight, but not of mind

of deaths, mistakes, and nastiness,

chicanery dressed up as truth,

the lies, from grey to black and white,

and things that live in metaphor:

the accusations from faith past

of things undone and those things done

and there’s no health.

And how will we look back on this,

when we’ve decided where we are,

and just how is it we’re involved,

when all mortality is ‘over there’

and death is nobody we know?

PIHW 4 Wednesday in Holy Week - Temptation

This poem developed from a thought about isolation and being forced onto one’s own resources – even though in the present circumstances for many those resources are extensive. 

      My mind went to the monk’s cell, that featureless abode of the single holy man where the very lack of distractions was to encourage contemplation.  The theory was good, but the practical was a little different.  Left to their own devices Monks could get bored, were afflicted with what used to be termed Acedia, regarded as a grave sin because it denied joy in the creation of god and it also allowed the development of sexual thoughts.  Monks needed to be kept busy because, forced in on their own resources, too often the release was sex or at least sexual thoughts!

     Anyway, my mind moved on from monks’ cells to The Temptation of Saint Antony – a popular subject for painters.  The popularity of the subject matter was because it allowed artists to give full scope to their imaginations.  In the story of the temptation, Saint Antony is assailed by devil and demons, but the exact form of his temptation is never made explicit, so artists made the not unreasonable assumption that the temptation was sexual and I have to say that in some of the depictions of the poor saint the artists have expended a great deal of fantastic imagination and disturbing detail on giving form to temptations which probably say a great deal more about the psychological state of the artists than it does about their understanding of things theological!

     It is easy to find representations of The Temptation of Saint Antony in art, just type the title into Google and bring up the images and you will probably see examples by Dalí, Ernst, Bosch, Grünewald, Spencer, Delvaux and Leonora Carrington and many others.

     I do not think that many people have time for contemplation – although what precisely they are actually ‘doing’ is moot.  We can amuse ourselves with almost infinite ease: libraries, art galleries, cinemas, theatres, opera houses, musicals, TV shows and on and on are all available at the click of a button as long as you have money and the internet.  And then there are drinks and drugs!

     The Covid-19 crisis has forced at least a modicum of introspection on us as we have been quartered in our ‘cells’.  That is hardly a fair comparison as we have ways ‘out’ of our confinement.  But for many it is true confinement and for all of us it is a limit on our freedom.

     I suppose that my final thought is that our basic drives are not too far submerged in a civilized character and that it doesn’t take much for the sex and monsters to rise up!

 

PIHW 4 Wednesday in Holy Week

 

Temptation

It’s always sex.

Paint slather-squeezed on canvases, 

pigmented tempera laid down on wood.

It’s always sex.

With nubile possibility, a-wrthe, a-squirm,

available!

It’s always sex.

It may be quite grotesque

(the pulchritude found in technique,

the loving detail, sharp and clear)

the flesh-near, putative consort

that yearns to stretch, devour and slash

with razor claws and sharp fanged jaws –

but, there will be hard-nippled breasts

and coiling, snaking, tongue-filled mouths

that search for virgin nakedness

beneath the stout, rough, holy cloth.

It’s always sex.

We think that we’ve outgrown the mirror’s lie

of that false world we see and take for truth;

we now have more self-images to hand

than graced the palaces of High Renaissance kings;

we move about a world that’s ours to touch

and knowledge that is free, at hand,

and we believe that we are almost civilized,

until we’re not

                                    and we are banished to

a single cell, where we are forced to look

inside, and find that there be dragons and

it’s always sex.  And monsters.

PIHW 3 Tuesday in Holy Week - History

The kick-start for this poem was a glimpse of an old Barça match on the TV which showed Camp Nou packed, with not a spare seat to be seen.  People packed together and having a rousing time.  It seemed like something from a previous age!  Did people really behave like that?  How did they get away with it!

     It was that sense of strangeness that informed my responses.

     Although not as fine as yesterday there was a ‘space, wisp-fringed’ that allowed sunshine to illuminate the terrace on the third floor and I felt that I should take advantage of it and indulge in a little light sunbathing.  As everything we now do is seen through the lens of the present crisis, I wondered about my frivolousness in using my time to get part of the way to the mythic brownness that I seek.  I had previously tried to do some writing, and in the pauses of writing, I observed the group of kids from the houses opposite us play basketball.  There was no sense of competition and there were no cries of appreciation for baskets made and no sorrow for baskets failed.  It seemed to be something that needed to be done on a Tuesday that wasn’t really a Tuesday during a Holiday that wasn’t really a holiday.

     In my mind this then mixed itself into the videos that have been replayed on TV and reshared on social media of people recreating Events in a domestic setting; videos that are funny and wistful at the same time.

     The one thing that truly shocked me was how ‘old fashioned’ the sight of a full football ground looked and how long ago such an event appeared to be. 

     The last line of the poem is, I think, a real question!

 PIHW 3 Tuesday in Holy Week

History

Today, the sky is mottled;

cloud-Morse sequences that

stutter to a kippered blue

confusion of the sea and air.

But overhead, directly overhead,

a space, wisp-fringed

is letting sun shine down.

Can sunbathing be justified?

To lie out, freezing time, in heat

behind closed eyes, but open ears

to hear

cheese-wire voiced,

the kids play on: play basket-win

and basket-lose (success

and fail equality) because

the points are not the point,

where then today and now the past

are all together as a life.  Of days.

Where only the last letters number

differences.

The month’s insistent, cool, soft breeze

suggests a season past, not yet to come.

We play at relativity,

say metaphor’s the way to go,

so we can joke-pretend

reality is almost like normality

and we can see

Olympics staged in sitting rooms;

Cross Channel Swims in a domestic bath;

Wimbledon fought out on balconies;

Summits gained up flights of stairs;

And then, TV, a replay of a Barça game,

Camp Nou filled up with not a space

for social distancing.

Whose past was that?