Poetry

Apocalypse 17

Ch. 17

‘What time is it, now, Master?’ I said looking

First up for the heavenly bodies, but there were none;

Then at my wrist watch. My back was aching;

A man’s back fails, when close on forty-nine.

‘Five hundred thousand years or more I reckon.’

He said, ‘Before the precursors of man

Had been conceived.’ I was tired and depressed,

And said: ‘I mean, do you think it is time to rest?’

I lay down where I was. ‘Is there no short cut,

To where my wife and children find themselves?’

And he, putting some gravel and a coat

Around me, answered thus: ‘No one deserves

To get before the judgement seat of God

And get there doing everything by halves.

For after that, you won’t be resurrected

Until you’ve thought about the way you have acted.

‘And first, today, can you watch all the cosmos

Collapse and fade and yet survive? I’ll teach you.

The Buddhists and the atheists are famous

For saying something like this: they say: “Let go

Of self and world, and focusing on the nose

And belly button enter the Bardo. “

They pull the door and make the door leaf move,

But end up shutting it and fail to leave.

‘But you, you pray and you call on God’s name

To activate the heart and lodge the self

In there, deep in there, in the self’s true home.

The heart is a great well head, an empty gulf

From which, like fire and flame, there has always come

Life, the Holy Spirit, seeming a wolf:

Hungry and unaccountable and from

The eternal world, but actually the Lamb.

‘Put mind and self deep inside in the heart.’

He finished his discourse. I slept and dreamed.

The sound of howling roused me from the dirt,

A forceful wind pushed me around and screamed,

Or many winds together and apart

Blew round that deep valley with high hills hemmed.

‘You’ve brought me here, you’ve carried me while I

Was still and resting. But what is this valley?’

I asked him that, and he: ‘We’re closer now

Half way, perhaps. Behind us the closing door,

The black explosive nowhere that you know

Killed all those who retreated. And before,

Are miseries for men who will not go,

Who will not go on forward. And right here

A sunken place where atheistic kings

Blow hard and get blown round and round in rings.’

Just as mount Snowdon on the Western face

Debouches into fifteen hundred feet

Of vertical cliffs forming a grand abyss

With other mountains standing opposite,

Just so this freezing hollow feature was.

The winds were cloudy dust, and when I put

My hand out voices seemed to asseverate

And shout and make human shapes inchoate.

I shouted to my master: ‘Who is he?

A black wind-form that puts a handkerchief

Into the socket of a weeping eye?

It looks like it is seeking some relief

By coming near to suck up near to me,

But cannot stand or stay still long enough.’

‘That is Lady Thatcher, or the Iron Lady,

Who unreflectively made England ready

‘To be the third and greatest total state.

There, see, that’s Stalin, aware of his crime

Against God; and that’s Hitler, opposite.’

‘But our Mrs Thatcher espoused freedom,’

I said. ‘How can…’, but Jesus cut me short.

‘Examine all the relics from the time,

Those relics that you find in memory,

When Britain flourished and said it was free.

‘Most recently, the flag of sex and madness

Has been put up above the Crown and Cross,

Put up here, there, above the courts and churches.

In children’s schools those Leftists taught their cause,

Of sexual liberation and its urges.

They taught the same at universities

For decades, seriously, so as to make

The whole society to be awake.

‘The courts refuse to harm the criminal

Calling him victim. Police and army

Are said to be redundant. Rank and file

In all professions, every MP,

Share one exact totalitarian will.

They call it equal opportunity.

It is the death of God writ large to man

And then the death of man itself in the end.’

I still refused belief to his suggestion.

‘Am I just stupid, or, is it not true,

There never was an actual insurrection

And Maggie Thatcher did not make a coup.

All leaders following her owed her affection.’

I scratched my head, and looked up ever anew

To find out if my Lord was playing games.

England had not been one of those regimes.

When we were moving onward through that vale,

And I reflected, I said: ‘Mrs T,

She had my father laid off from Crosville;

She sold the business off; but the country

Was at a turning point; there was no evil.’

A man surprised me walking next to me

As I was musing thus. He had a form

Ideal and solid, real living and warm.

‘You’re heading onward, like me, we can share

A few steps talking meanwhile as we work.

One or the other of us will falter

And make a slower pace, but we can talk.

I heard your voices through the violet air,

Conjecturing about the state of dark

Which fell on Britain slowly, not at once

But in one or two generations.

‘My time was spent considering the right

A king has to coerce the church of God

And I was exiled first and took to flight

To France six years, with the Archbishop’s rod,

Then cut down at the altar by a knight.

Because it was the contrary of good

To put the church and Christ’s inheritance

In Henry Second’s avaricious hands.