“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.
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