The Poetry Society

I hope not to be killed in an embarassment

of bombs, caught on a mountain road

lovely for a Spring ramble, torn already

from my home sky. Pray for the souls of,

if collateral blessing can be of use,

if those that are left can bear it from us.

 

A dose of crypt

He's had his dose of crypt,

a quick in and out,

carrier bag on the seat,

sat down on the seat beside it,

looked,

it seemed looked hard

ahead, a single focus,

one shoulder bent,

this is it, this is an it

sort of experience, an it

sort of place, then up again

and out. Now I have

written this

and I, too, am up and out,

having had my dose.

 

 

If you would care to wait a few minutes only

I will fetch the box of tricks

if you understand me,

sit by the window, I suggest, patiently,

but with your back to it

and play with your tongue

rolling it around your teeth

and smooth your foot along the floor,

how long is it now

since the crucifixion? The applause

I suppose has died away,

do help yourself to chocolates,

you may need the sugar,

I want to laugh sometimes, then more,

for no reason I can think of.

Remember me to your friend,

the one in the passport office,

tell him I know all too well

his litttle game his sleight of hand.

 

 

It would be good now

to talk with fish again

and to the sea itself

and to the indifferent sand.

 

I am in too much

argument with myself,

I have been too fractious

with myself, as if

carving words on a wall

would tell me

what was the other side of it.

 

I spoke to gulls last week

but far from home,

far from the breathtaking sea.

I need to talk with fish again

and with the sea itself.

 

 

"Let's open a shop", said Wulfstan,

"haven't we shapely off-cuts of Hollington and Hurdcott with fossils,

haven't we draft manuscripts, Brother Floreat's mistakes?

We could sell candles, we are good at candles,

we could sell beefy oakcakes and fresh goats' milk,

we could sell quail's eggs and seed corn.

And relics, don't forget the relics, such as we have

or might reasonably be thought to have, lookalike bones,the rapture of snippets of fine embroidered linen -

some even with remnants of name tags - and apostles' boots, cockleshells,

remnants' of staffs, hairs from Christ's own Palm Sunday donkey,

all, if they believe, for the good of folks' souls.

We could sell post-Millennium badges: We have come through,

and why hasn't anyone had the idea of little drawings

of our new building, set out on slices of parchment,

gifty sort of things? Our Crypt and Chapter House, for example,

wouldn't people buy pictures of them?"

 

 

I must let you go, God of dreamy, wide-eyed William Langland, poet,

and to your God, too, Mr William Tyndale, over from Gloucestershire

on your way to candling the language and to be yourself kindled.

 

It isn't hard to let you go, God of Guilio de Medici, in the 1520s

bishop here for two years, nominated but never enthroned, too busy

being Archbishop of Florence and Narbonne

and being son of Lorenzo the Magnificent and being nephew

of Pope Leo X, until you became busy being pope yourself

as Clement VII, and became busy then refusing or over breakfast

waving away Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon

who had been married before to the king's brother

who still lies here. Breathless I can let go of your God.

Goodbye to the God for whom you, Thomas Cranmer, who preached here,

went to the stake, and yours, too, Bishop Latimer, who preceded him

who had for God ordered out Our Lady of Worcester. Goodbye to the God

of Edward Oldcorne, SJ, down the road at St George's RC

martyred 1606 at Red Hill. And to yours, Dean Juxon, who in fear or pride

or both attended Charles the First at his execution

and preached when Charles II came back from exile. And goodbye

to your God, Bishop Hooper, burned at Gloucester.

 

Goodbye to your holy reasons, Queen Mary Tudor, here with Cardinal Pole,

gloating I suppose, and goodbye to your sister, Elizabeth's holy reasons,

coming through the north door under a canopy

to see her uncle Arthur's chantry.

And goodbye to your God, Richard Edes,

as you begun to hum with reform, to suggest your own watchful words

for the new translation, suddenly extra-episcopal 1604, taken by death.

 

Need I let you go, God of the third George, as you listened here

to the trumpet sounding and to the Glory of the Lord

and to the Alleluia and to the Amen from the Three Choirs?

 

Goodbye to the God of your conviction, Thomas Harris, fifty-eight years

in the wilderness, waiting still and for ever at the miserimus door.

 

Llewelyn the Last ap Gruffydd, Prince of Wales, at this boundary

from beyond the west bank of the Severn in enemy territory,

a prince now in name only, what did you mean by God - Duw -

when here in 1278 you married Eleanor, Simon de Montfort's daughter ?

What did you pray, Llewellyn, to God - Duw - when you blundered

into death on home territory? What did the king say to God

when at Rhuddlan he received no doubt with laughter your head?

 

2

 

Goodbye to your God, William Temple, meeting here

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy,

 

A POET, A PROPHET, A PASSIONATE

SEEKER AFTER TRUTH, AN ARDENT

ADVOCATE OF CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP,

 

Goodbye, God of the trenches. Goodbye, God of Woodbines.

 

Goodbye, Anne Ken's God, wife of Izaak Walton, Anne in the Lady Chapel,

 

who lyeth buryed 1662

soe much as could dye,

her primitive piety celebrated,

her great and general knowledge,

her remarkable prudence.

 

Goodbye twenty-seven year old Grace Thorp's God,

 

 

HE WHOSE SPIRIT BREATHES THE AIR DIVINE

THAT GIVES TO SOULS THEIR LOVELINESS AND GRACE,

SOONEST EMBOW'RS PURE FAITHFUL HEARTS LIKE THINE

IN HIS OWN PARADISE THEIR BLISSFUL PLACE,

 

Goodbye to the God of the men listed here who

 

died of wounds

or just died or fell

in the South African War,

in the Sikh Wars,

and in two World Wars.

 

Goodbye to the God of Charles Gore declining Hartlebury to live instead

in what is now the Loch Ryan Hotel - on the site of the last battle

of the Civil War. Goodbye to the God of your new diocese of Birmingham

on whose lawn you stand now in all earthly weathers.

 

Goodbye to the God of Matilda de Clifford who went well-folded,

rosary well in hand, demurely, I mean innerly so still, so ready,

with your small, thin, pinched lips, wound in by a wimple.

 

Goodbye to the God of the singles-in-death club in the quire:

John, Arthur, the Duke of Hamilton, and such shrined bones

as may have been stowed away of Oswald and Wulfstan.

 

*

 

All over, the dressing up,

all over, the bells and smells,

I liked that dance.

 

I grieve for somewhere else to be,

a place where no wailing monody

stifles the lament and fire

of silence. And for the choir,

I grieve for music's argument

as demanding or lenient

as I could bear and a bit more.

I grieve intent

other than in my own heart.

 

See what this place is,

the chairs speak of numbers,

the height speaks of extravagance

or call it wealth, or it's bravado,

or it's a surreal antidote, the length

speaks of an allocation

of distance until the holy

can come into view and touch,

the tangibles of it. The tombs

speak of the paid-up dead, lonely

for never having belonged on the floor

of the cornmarket. The stone

smells flat now, no gloss on it

for the eyes either, no eyes in us or nose

for the hiddenness. What we see and smell

is what there is.