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.
No comments:
Post a Comment