"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.