Poetry

Apocalypse 26

“It’s dark here, which conceals the sight of blood;

And yet the cries of the dying fills my ears;

The dark recalls those first days when the good

Came to me, and I met it, years and years

Back in my past, when I first sat and prayed,

And you were there, beyond my hopes and fears,

Eternally – when once I put aside

My senses, and habitual angry pride.

“In darkness and in quiet for an hour

I sat immobile, waiting for some gift.

Immobile and unmoving and dead poor

Watching and waiting, offering short shrift

To any thought; as if dead; as if pure

Only because it seemed as if I lived

In quiet holy peaceful sightless death.

Master, why should this pathway lead to faith?

“Is praying in this way the thing you want?

Are they to blame, these bankers and these thieves,

If they could not rise to the firmament

By dying like this? How is it dying saves?”

And he: “Dying in prayer is really meant

To let God live in you; who really lives

When you have stepped aside in total dark

And put your heart and head to silent work?”

“As night has equal share with day, just so

You get old and you die more every day

And devastation follows after you.

Your ancestors were half dog half monkey

See Kenyanthropicus. Now think how I

The Son of God, emptied in every way,

Ask you to follow me and share my fate,

Which you may do by calling on my Dad,

“Within you, in the death and dark, so blessed.”

And I: “But the elite, Thatcher and Howe,

And other rulers of the recent past,

They boasted they were doing good somehow.”

“To know if kings are good, a simple test

Suffices: does the king protect the few

Those saints and clerics who make up the church?

Or does he serve some other sort of bunch?

“And, once the church is founded and at home,

Does he let people be, or tyrannise?”

So he explained, and I listened to him:

He ended: “All the nation really is

Is a King’s sword of protection around them,

Who live in generations in God’s ways.”

Now knowing just how simple things should be,

I felt ashamed about my ancestry

And how it would have been so easy to

Have saved existence from this great collapse

And asked: “Where then exactly did we go

Far from the path?” And he: “That was, perhaps,

In 1914, when during the snow

The Christmas truce required Christian bishops

To speak in England and in every state

And stop the war while it was not too late.

“The soldiers knew the war on very front

Was useless murder, not war in the least,

But an industrial slaughter with no point.

The Christian bishops, absent from their post,

They let the boys march with conscious intent,

That they would die and they would all be lost.

It was that year men turned their face from God

And He from them, when all the best were dead.

“And with that went the British Empire, too,

And with that God’s influence on the race,

And finally, the entire world was through.”

At that exact precise moment arose

The loudest noise. We had come into view

Of light again, and a terrific noise

Rose up on every side and from the ground

The shout of human mouths on either hand.

And bodies rose up from before our feet.

It horrified me. Legs and arms broke lose

And pierced the mud upwards moving about;

Then muddy bodies, and the sound of cries

So many people still covered into blood.

“These are the holy Christian martyrs,”

He said, “Who died at Verdun and the Somme

And Paschendaele, and Mons, the lot of them.”

I was amazed, and could not find my tongue.

But what I would have asked was, “Why right now?

We only just discussed them and their wrong.”

It upset me so late to get to know

That these soldiers were martyrs all along,

Who died for God, obedient and true,

Whose death was a catastrophe for God.

They started walking with us on our road.

This great coincidence made me suspect

That my reality was made for me

And me alone. “I know you now reflect,

On whether something shapes reality.

The truth is you are utterly correct,

The world was made for you; but equally

For others in their sphere; and the Creator

Has joined all worlds in one by his great labour.

“But you will see the lines which join each life

When you give up the world. It has no worth -

Be immobile, and blind, unspeaking, deaf,

Destroy the world to purify the heart.

These three things, as St Paul says, are enough:

Beyond this fearful darkness there is faith;

And hope in better things for future times

And love when total desolation comes.

“Because I will annihilate it all

All matter and events in every way

Until the atomisation of the soul.”

We saw some men pass like the KKK,

The penitential clothing of Seville,

Without the eye slits mostly, so that they

Were walking blindly, in their blackened robes

“The Church of England’s negligent bishops.”

My lord said that. We saw the young men go

Arisen martyrs moving to the future.

There is not space to tell what else I know

And what my master told me. It will feature

In other chapters. But he said that we

Were nearly at the end, about one quarter

Was left until the elect had been chosen;

And so of these songs, maybe half a dozen.