Poetry

Apocalypse 15

The nation was the Crown’s once, that’s to say

A armed gang with a strong man in the lead.

In Bede we learn how Christians made their way

To beg such kings to turn themselves to God.

And that they did, hence Christianity

In England. Yet in recent times the crowd

Forget these origins and make the state,

Which is a mere gang, god in its own right.

As if, bereft as it was in the last days,

Bereft of God, aimless and leveled out,

It might enforce its will on families.

I have not seen my children, not allowed

To see my children for these last four years.

We English were a trusting faithful lot

But now that we left God he punished us

With laws and bureaucrats to suffer thus.

Lloyd George and Churchill, you deserve my spite!

With Welfare bills that gave power to the Crown

Where God alone should rule and take his seat.

But that is done with now. It is all gone.

The foothills of Snowdonia were ahead

And my hell was behind me; the God Man

Was with me with; and the hippopotamus

And elephants were at the side of us

And rhinos and black men from Africa

That spread about the world as hominins.

My leader spoke: ‘My Father gave them law.

One day, or many days perhaps, these ones

Start to feel troubled when they do murder;

And they are anxious eating uncooked things

The way an animal can never be

And burying his parents tenderly.

‘A consciousness and an ideal thought

Seems to be planted in his apelike brain.

He has a soul, and henceforth in his heart

The whole created world is found therein.

The Word inside the world shines big and bright

Inside his spirit and across the plane

Where he goes hunting with his moral rules.

Here truth promotes survival, deceit fails.’

There were more bodies cut about and hacked

I do not know if by self-sacrifice

Or by that angel raising the elect

And lowering those who thought their sex and race

Was everything, while in all else they lacked.

I stopped and looked closely into a face,

And was surprised to recognise down there

The face of that French lawyer, Robespierre.

‘You, here?’ I asked him. I turned to my guide

To check that I was still where I had been,

And was not dreaming. ‘You were not De Sade.

You thought, you were intelligent and keen,

So surely you could march on from this mud,

With your ideas and with your guillotine?’

He answered me, though speaking through clenched teeth

From pain he felt having been peeled to death.

‘The revolution failed; the old king gone,

A new king comes. And then ask, what, above all,

Did I believe in? You mention that one

Who wrote the '100 Days' in the Bastille,

That lord locked there with sodomy his sin

Who wrote his work on a great toilet roll;

He was the wisest of the atheists

When he said cruelty alone subsists.

‘That it subsists beneath mere human thought,

And under it lies only apathy

And at the base of apathy there is nought.

Leave me alone now, soon I will be free.’

He closed his eye, and turned himself about.

I stood and asked my master: ‘Is that true,

That reason, taken seriously, ends up aimless

And brings its leading men to this distress?’

He did not answer. Coming from behind

A man came walking with an ugly face,

But not from wounds, and not to be unkind,

He had a flat face and an upturned nose,

A bald head and a belly small and round.

An oldish character, he came to us,

And stopped to talk, declaring: ‘Socrates

Is what they call me, the last sage of Greece

‘Forerunner of the Lord. And I was right

To see the logos in the world of reason

And teach the eternal life in broad daylight

For which the democrats gave me the poison.

Forerunner and great lover of the Lord.’

And I: ‘Sir, you did not know Christ in person;

The Greeks are not said to have foreseen Christ.’

And he: ‘I would accept only the best.

‘You leave a man to wonder at his point,

What point his life has, he will get insight.

Leave him alone or in a prison joint:

He sees that God is in a man alright.

The intellect is light for every saint.

When serving in the ranks as a hoplite

And serving Athens well in its defence

I loved some mortal men, to my expense

‘And suffer here too long perhaps, but know

I foresaw Christ and knew the creator.’

‘Like Alcibiades?’ I said. And he: 'I will tell you,

This pile of democratic secular

Atheist men and women killed him too

When they exiled the man to win the war

For them.’ He finished. I began to mull

Over the loss of time and my exile.

Or, since there was no way out, no escape

My obscure exile within my own land.

‘They made me earn my bread and save and scrape

By fitting doors on houses, time out of mind,

And took away my chances and my hope;

I found no patron and no outstretched hand

To pick me up and certainly no ear

To hear me say, “how shall we live this year?”

‘Where will we find the money?’ Then my lord,

He took me by the shoulders speaking sternly:

‘Do not make such complaints. Your life was hard.

But you know very well that I was with thee.

I promised you would never go without.

You never went without enough money.

I was your patron.’ Humbled by his tone,

I lowered my eyes in shame thinking thereon.