Poetry

Apocalypse 28

These are the things I cannot do without

The first is air, the second water, then

Some food. But it is easy to forget

You cannot live without some kind of plan.

A man without a point will soon find that

Mere existence is unbearable pain

And living is a task he cannot do;

An aimless man without a point will die.

Because men are hard wired to look for meaning

And if there is none, then their body fails.

My senses failed, as I have been explaining,

And at that time, somewhere in southern Wales

Those newly risen men had started running,

Left me behind. And as I say, it kills

When you have lost the thing that gave you purpose

I felt it then, reader, I know because

I could not find my master. He had gone.

A soldier panics when awake or dreaming

He cannot find his rifle or his gun

Immediately his heart has started drumming

And then he starts to question everyone

And upend everything, sweating and damning

Eventually, he is calm and resolute

Despairing now, and resigned to his fate.

Just so, I panicked first, then grew morose

And terrified and finally resigned.

“Where are you, Lord, where are you, my Jesus?”

If you have lost your self you lose your mind

A self is very easy so to lose

And since the end of days my closest friend

My guide had also been my eternal being

“Jesus, come back,” I said, and started crying.

You know, how time goes slower in a fight.

How in action, when bullets fly, all time

Goes slow, so you have time to see the light

Creeping toward you from a gun or bomb.

Just so, a man who has lost himself is caught

In everlasting never ending gloom.

I try to let you know the quantity

Of days and hours, but that time escapes me.

My master came back. “I have been to pray,

Alone as I did frequently back then

Away from followers. A man must be

Prepared to be entirely on his own,

And find himself in dim eternity

With our Father; you are not alone

When you have learned this highest truest love

That is the source of every motive.”

“Where have you been, Sir?” I said, he replied:

“To pray for you to face the Last Judgement.

We are not walking on until my Dad,

Has blessed you. Now, on this summit pavement,

Collect some bits to burn, collect some wood,

And build a fire.” And saying this, he went.

With no one else around, and on my own

I started work, less troubled than I had been.

Before too long I found someone nearby.

For God provides with hands ready to work.

Like God protects with men ready to die.

She picked up sticks and bits there in the dark,

And stacked them on ledge of rocks which lay

Higher than I had placed mine: “Can I ask,”

I said: “Are you helping me out?” And she:

“Place all the things for the fire up there, on high.”

I recognised her then. “Is that you, Nain?

I know your accent, though your face is young.

You couldn’t walk and didn’t know me then.

But now you’re in your prime and nothing is wrong.”

“Put the combustibles on this high stone.

The fire will burn when Jesus comes along

And sets it flaming. In this atmosphere

Only a God will set it all afire.”

She worked. I said: “You were an atheist

You always spoke against the Christians.”

“I never did so. How could you attest

To what was in my mind? Only those ones

The Jehovah Witnesses, those I detest.

I did not have the words, but I had the sense

To know that whereas I loved in my home

I owed my happiness and love to Him.

“I mean, to God.” The wind was blowing hard

And rain was falling. When the job was done

I crouched behind a stone from the blizzard

She pulled my coat to me then did her own,

And watched out for my master. When we heard

The noise of someone coming, she went on.

“Wait, don’t go yet,” I said, “Nana, please stay.”

And she: “Take care, Jason, see you, goodbye.”

She left me, quickly engulfed by the night.

A man came stepping from the other way.

“The Triumph of love, you see work its way out

From lovely woman’s heart; the ground and clay

Of the world,” he said, and though grown blind and tired

I knew it was not Jesus next to me.

“I am that Wilson, once Prime Minister

While that young woman bloomed in the clean air.

“She and her whole age fell down in protest

Or in the final secularisation

Of Protestant tradition without Christ.

We made it fine for girls to do abortion

And generally over-sexualised

The law, so there arose just one restriction:

The new law tends to be: ‘Do your own thing’

The young, the old, and God lost all their rank.

“All those aborted children and those broken

Homes. Social life confused by queer sex.”

“This must be Harold Wilson who has spoken,”

I said. “Yes, and I go about and ask

That people forgive me,” he said. “I reckon

If we could study all the parish books

Interrogating every mortal soul

No one could stop the age of rock and roll.

“Because the Church’s weakness was so stark.

From that time when they closed the monasteries

The English were destined to make their mark

In physical and in aggressive ways.

Notice how Ireland remained Catholic

Resisting science and its factories.

It took five hundred years to run it out,

To turn love of God into a lake of doubt.”

I said that, and the Labour politician:

“Those Anglo-Irish, and those scientists

Are interesting; go see Richard Burton,

And Cromwell, Wellington, and also Yeats.

Do not dismiss them all in your dark passion.

It’s true, the land is full of atheists…”

And then my master came back with a torch

And set my fire alight, the fruit of my search.