Poetry

Apocalypse 3

There were the dead, they moved about the streets

And not skeletal, putrefied shadow,

But rising fully living from their pits;

Not torn like snails of unformed escargot

Smelling of earth and hot from special plates;

But as I was, and as you would be, too,

If you were there, with body and with spirit,

As pure as gold unmixed and of high karat.

By my wrist watch, I had been dead for hours

But by my reckoning it was the time

Before men started noticing the years;

The world had changed, but the people stayed the same.

I asked my companion, “The universe

Has stopped and like the pieces of a game

The parts are being put back in the box

But why are people distilled from these works?”

And he: “My father sees what is, has been,

And will be, it is one eternal event.

Though man’s mind is God’s mind, and God is man,

Yet none of them yet threw aside attachment

Entirely and in high dispassion

Renounced his body for a single moment

To join with Him; today the great world scroll

Is rolled up throwing out single people.

“Death and rebirth and body and discomfort

The scene and drama made laboriously

And now demolished, were all made with effort

So that you could be loved, and come to me.

And now you come.” Those were the words he offered.

And I, yet more anxious than previously

Said: “Sir, I mean, without the earth and sky

How can I have my home and family?

“You told me I would see them and save them.

How can we live?” And even then the cold

And uninhabited and roofless home,

That world, was not the place to bring a child.

“I could do anything; thus, I could seem,”

He answered me, “to populate a world

And make illusory friends and things to love;

But my creation is real, as we will prove.”

I now regret and then I did regret

The questions asked, the doubts that I expressed

But had you been there, would you have done it

A different way? See how I was distressed

Angry and sad at once, not thinking straight.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and he: “What comes first

Is making way out of this ruined land.

Let’s make our way, and for now take my hand.”

We went, and where once flowed the river Gwenfro,

A little river, some might call a brook,

Past scrap and bushes, wandering and narrow,

There was a dull noise as the land fell back

Before a massive flood all black and yellow

Without the signs of slimy orange rock

That I had seen there when I was a child

But deep and vast and awful to behold.

There was another noise almost as loud

Behind the falling rain, raindrops from dust

Which layer over layer made a cloud

For raindrop seeding, rain the hue of rust,

I heard them, people gathered, who instead

Of towns and jobs were into mobs compressed;

So like a flock of sheep on a hillside

They gathered wailing by the river wide.

It’s painful to revive the memory

And I am hard pressed to write down the sight.

A car park is a large territory

And if you packed it with people dead tight

Then figure with your mental imagery

A hundred more of these, that might be fit

To show you all the dead men and women

Assembled at the river on that plain.

They were abject and undistracted there

And yet I had no sympathetic mind;

All naked psyches and all bodies bare.

My master led me forward through that band.

While many in the crowd stayed where they were,

A lot were leaving on the other hand.

A human shape was stood beside a ship

I half expected him to hold a whip.

He was no demon or terrific beast

Corralling those souls for the river crossing.

It was a man whose face I recognised.

Seeing him stood there, I thought something missing

To my view of him, being catechised

By Dante, since by Dante’s fearful lesson,

We learn who leads in hell and its Limbo;

In Dante cruel creatures rule the show.

To children, teachers often times provide

Stories and pictures for their education:

Explorers, soldiers, things that invocate

An ideal for the child’s own imitation.

Now David Livingstone was what they taught,

When I was young in my now vanished nation.

Him, solitary self-taught missionary

Who went alone to convert Africa.

The evangelist of God in a black land

Who famously went up the river Nile,

This was that man, stood on the torpid strand,

Shouting: “Awake, wake up, you slept a while.

Did you imagine that death was the end?

Half of you gave up faith in God until

Death was a pleasure, a kind of escape!

But wake up now and get aboard this ship.

“We’ll go to more life. Come here and be chosen

Whoever loves himself to pass this point

Can be responsible for what he has done

And knows that God in him together joined

Is what he is, come here on board, get on!”

Some moved to him, but many others turned.

Although I tried go to him and talk,

My master held me back, “Just let him work.

“He’s sifting out the vast number of souls

Who weigh more than a feather in the scales;

After today, those will not have a pulse.”

I do not set out to fabricate tales;

But this occurred: that man moved by angels

That Livingstone, cried: “Apostle of Wales!”

Then ran toward us, offering to embrace,

And did so, before going back to his place.