Poetry

Apocalypse 34

There was a track, with fire or maybe water

On either side, an ocean not a lake.

Whether air or fire or water doesn’t matter,

It roiled and burned each side the path we took.

The summits and the ridges found in nature

Like Helvelyn and Penyfan alike

Give you a track through the air on either side

Just such a tightrope I walked with my guide.

Before you think that I suffer dementia

Because I cannot tell you if that sea

Was fire or air, I speak of my adventure

Now recollecting in tranquillity

While at the time I was in greatest danger

I don’t know more than that, and here is why:

I was afraid and suffered vertigo

Afraid of falling and of letting go.

It was the end. Now this road terminated

At two upright posts holding up a banner

Whose legend read: ‘You are congratulated.

It’s finished, you are done, in every manner.’

And thus, the reward for which I had waited

The final finish line. I was the winner.

I said: ‘Where are the islands of the blessed?

Where are my children, like you promised?’

I looked to Jesus. He was stood beside me.

There were no saints and no more punishment,

Such things as I had seen to come this way;

There was no way of further achievement.

Whereas my England needs an obituary

And has attained the end of its descent

Into irrelevance, and the Falklands

Those vestigial remains had left our hands

When Foreign Office leftist bureaucrats

Had given them away to enemies;

And just as Britain slid into the pits,

Which is the end for all democracies;

So now, the whole world fell apart in bits.

‘I’m offered up to your tender mercies,’

I said. He did not speak. ‘I can’t go on.

There is no path, so let thy will be done.’

Renouncing hope in myself in this way,

My eyes beheld my friend and God transform.

My words are weak, all I can do is say

That Christ, my friend, in one moment became

A giant, massive, king, outrageously,

And I was at his shoulder, next to him.

Thus he was drawn by Michaelangelo

As Christ Destroyer in the Sistine Chapel.

And so my story did not end right there

I did not get my ticket punched for good

I did not check out of the hotel, or

I did not cash my chips in. Rather, God

Like 2 Para on Goose Green in the war

Ensured that Britain was not lost, instead,

Made impossible things happen and be;

So we went walking onwards, Christ and me.

And like the Royal Navy he went on,

Which had two hundred steel ships in those seas,

And like the Scots Guards who took Tumbledown

And other miracles resembling these,

So was my Lord. For at the origin

Of time and space some fifty million years

I saw him there, resisting and resisted,

He seemed to me the king, and nothing else existed.

Our pathway was beyond material shapes

Among the waves of fire and freezing ice

And if I call on Dante then perhaps

You will forgive me. In the Paradise

The poet reaches to the topmost steps

And looks into the light with his own eyes:

He sees reality and the ideal

He sees his own life in full and for real.

See all events it’s possible to know,

All animals, all women and all men,

All colours of desire dark or aglow.

Eternally, all places, everyone.

But looking deeper, looking back at you,

A pair of eyes, a human form divine.

And that is God, he saw God’s real face

More real and wonderful than all of this.

In just this way the most high God, Jesus

Is like the substrate and the eternal hope.

When men go climbing in the high places

They often take a second man with rope;

For any climbing of rock or cliff faces

Will render men afraid, too weak to cope,

When they’re alone. The heights and voids are bad;

They terrify and make the mind go mad.

Only the eagle can survive alone

A thousand meters higher than the ground,

Three meters is the measure of the span

Its wings have, when they open on the wind.

The Greeks said Zeus assumed the shape of one

When he went from Olympos to mankind.

But Jesus is a man and not a bird

Who went through fire taking me, unafraid.

If I have shown the way of my descent

Into the darkness and in the last days,

And come back from the dead with my account

To show how Christ led me in all these ways

And carried me across that element

Which burned and smoked and fried to death all those

Who sinned and did not change, did not repent,

I wonder if you know what I have meant?

Are you persuaded by my simple verse?

As I was being carried then, I saw

No signs of any other survivors,

Though I survived, even me, a great sinner.

It was beyond my wits, among the fires,

Or on the land or on the approaching shore,

To find an individual person there.

It seemed that everyone was dead forever.

My master silently brought me to land

And soon exemplified a normal man,

In shape and size. We were stood on the strand

And then my master said: ‘Now having won,

And having seen the destruction of mankind,

The judgement and the trial can begin.

The Last Judgement as it was often highte.’

We set off making way toward the light.