Poetry

Apocalypse 18

As ospreys, deep in love with Anglesey,

Collecting fish and eating them alone

Through Spring and Summer, take flight to Biscay,

Moving along the coast in groups of ten

And fail mostly, dying along the way;

And as the inner dark forces them on,

Across the vast and pitiless Sahara,

So life persists through clarity and error.

The incensed and wrathful and immortal soul

Insists upon its right to be alive

And do and be and love its own sweet will.

I thought of this while we were on the move

Me and my leader, and when we stood still

I said to him: ‘You know, that’s what I love

To be alive. I disdain punishment

I am here and obdurate until the end.

‘The world is crisped and burnt; it does not matter.’

And he, divine man and entirely human,

Said: ‘See that black horse strutting through the litter

Of earth. It is the third horse, bringing famine.

How will your wilful pride hold up much later

When you are starving, gasping like a salmon

When it has reached the ancestral mating place?

Is will and wrath sufficient for this race?’

So, I reflected on the gift of life

In silence after that, walking those hills.

‘My black rider will sift out all the chaff;

He weighs men’s anger in a pair of scales.

The lust for life is good, but not enough.

And it is time to kill the sharks and whales

The megacreatures thriving under sea.

They need to go, they can no longer be.’

Dear reader, I was grateful to my God,

For life and being here in any case.

Starving to death I would still retain my pride.

‘I stood my ground, confronting the police

Who came to get me when they set aside

The social contract. And still I refuse

Forgiveness to them on the principle

The state can’t tyrannise its own people.

‘They even tried to shut the bleeding Church!’

I went on in this vein, and when I finished,

He said: ‘You are incensed, and it’s too much.’

Where were we? At the time when man had vanished.

What place was it? I cannot scratch that itch,

I cannot answer. Nearby, men had fished

The carcasses of whales out of ditch

So it was by the sea and was a beach.

The great Leviathan upon the strand

Was laid out huge out of its element

A hundred souls were working all around

To kill and cut it up for nourishment

And so as to fulfil the Lord’s command.

But this activity was punishment

For, though I was free, they were fixed fast,

Engaged in wrathful eating of that feast.

And thus, like birds digesting raw fish meat,

With whale oil rolling down their stupid cheeks

In expectation of more carrion yet,

I saw some faces I had seen in books,

Some here and there, distinguished men of art.

I’ll tell of one such with some brief remarks.

It was the mighty earth conquering Rhodes,

I saw there, though it was against the odds.

‘Why aren’t you feeding with the rest of us?’

He said, and I: ‘Will you be satisfied?’

He wiped his chin and left the great carcass

And said: ‘I have some freedom here inside,’

He pointed to his head, and then said this:

‘This wrath and hunger to predominate

Met with such luck because it was self-less;

Rhodesia was my gift to all of us.

‘I would have painted all the globe in pink

If time allowed, and taken from the blacks

All Africa and put it in a bank.

They did not know civilisation’s tricks.’

His unrepentant hatred made me think

That he was unaware, that to make tracks

He had to change his mind and look higher

Than any merely temporal empire.

‘I won’t deny,’ I said, ‘that you worked hard

And justified your actions to a Queen;

But now the world has ended. This desert

Is fit for savages, so be a man;

Direct your rage in loyalty to our Lord.’

‘What lands did you, in your allotted span,

See with your own eyes?’ He said, and then I:

‘East and West Europe, Iraq and Shanghai.’

He laughed, this Lord of England, ennobled

For all the wealth he made: ‘I bet you did!

Your deals were nothing next to what I pulled.

Leave me, walk on.’ So, I left him for dead,

Watching so great a man become defiled.

‘Such people made the poet Yeats decide

To sing in symbols and escape existence,’

My Lord said fixing his eyes on the distance.

‘The seas will empty, and the land as well.

All these creations will be written off,

And once more exist only in the ideal

And not in any world composed of stuff.

These angry wilful souls will hunt them all.’

In response I said: ‘I was with my wife

So many days in places by the ocean

She saw God in the water in her fashion.

‘I know that I belong here with these wolves

That I am ambitious, but don’t leave me here.

I spent decades with them to serve themselves

Infatuated by a mad desire

To be like Caesar and to gather slaves.

I was saved by failure, or better by prayer.’

‘I will not leave you here,’ he said to me.

And so we went on by that gloomy sea.

And just as symbolists made up their verse

To forget the nineteenth century bourgeois,

So Byron wrote against those travellers

Who went to India with English ways,

And made the entire land a part of ours,

Like Clive who raised an army in those days,

And built an empire equal to the one

Which William First built with his invasion.

Just so, I found that Clive of India

Whose house was Powys Castle for a while

And I remember me and Galya

Went there with Jaxon, visiting that pile.

But what that man and I discussed is rare

And there is not sufficient time to tell.

This song is finished, here endeth the song

May God forgive me if I sang it wrong.