Poetry

Judgement 8

“So there I was, at a temple in the middle

Of darkness, among shadows in the daytime.

Let me be terse, I will not pose a riddle,

Let me describe the place to which I came.

If some long distance runner wants the medal

He must make loneliness and hurt his home,

Be friendly with his own mind and his shadows;

And he must overtake the other runners.

“I heard the others moaning in the water

Some women and some men outside the chapel.

Inside the temple there I’d find the daughter

Of her own son, and I was capable

Of entering. The others didn’t matter;

Their heads were like the apples in a bucket

Floating in there and coming up and ducking.

“And further out, from time to time I saw

A massive thing, a beast loved by the young,

One of those things we call a dinosaur,

Whose bones are only just as big and strong

As gravitational and atomic law

Will let them be. A poet in his song

Has never had the vision of those days

That I have - I am the first to sing of these.

“I was there under judgement after death

To undergo the post-apocalypse,

And all my journey was the aftermath

Of world end, time stop, total space collapse.

I had survived so far because of faith.

And Jesus was the guide of all my steps.

It happened that I faced judgement alone

Weighed down, and like a runner, going on.

“To me it seemed that dead humans are tried

By going to twelve festivals in turn;

So I had seen and passed the Christmastide

And then the Presentation, where we learn

That Christ replaces all the offerings made

At the altar where before they used to burn

An animal so as to see with eyes

And peer into the light of future days.

“For the Holy Ghost is with us from now on,

If we should ask and with a holy life

Resist the world and so desist from sin.

And ultimately, this is what is chief:

That when you look around and look within

The loneliness seems to have been the cost

Of the Kingdom and becoming Holy Ghost.”

This discourse was said by a massive lad

Who had emerged while I was trying to go.

His hair was long, and in his powerful head

He had no eyes but holes where eyes should be.

And I said: “Do you want to go inside,

To see our Saviour in the here and now?”

And he: “I’m blind, what do you think I’ll see?

And I have seen already, naturally.

“I was without a personality

And had poor judgement. I was like a mirror

Warped no doubt, to assist my own country

To help it to survive into the future.

A Nazirite. But now you must know me:

When being most myself and most in error

I was the great destroyer for Israel

Samson I was, and Samson I am still.”

We started walking, and he found his path

Without the need of any help from me,

Although his eye sockets were empty both.

And I said: “Sir, you must know how to pray.

The bongo drums are things that you must loath

The naked dancers round the banyan tree,

The savages, the snake gods of the Greeks

The strange god Dagon and those kinds of freaks

“That God hates, too. But, is the internal prayer

The centre? Is it the pole around which spins

Our life with Christ, that meditative stare?”

Then he replied: “The saints take all those pains

Only to be like God; they climb the stair

A contemplative ladder of silence.”

And I: “Was it the same in earliest time,

Did judges, prophets, angels do the same?”

“Exactly so, and they were Orthodox.”

We walked the watery way, dark and all thick.

I wanted to talk of those great attacks

He made for his beloved when he took

The jaw bone of an ass to do God’s works.

And so I said: “Tell me of your mistake

In marrying Delilah, a prostitute.

I’ve made mistakes myself, so put me straight.”

And Samson, that great judge of Israel said:

“I speak of the end of times in which you lived;

There was no Church in England, it was dead.

As Pascal said, where God’s will is not served

They find God everywhere, in good, in bad,

It changes day to day. And they deserved

To have the temple pulled down on their head.

And what amazes me the most,” he said,

“Is that they had no country, no attachment

To friends, and neighbours, or to any place.

Though Jews held on to Israel til the Judgement,

And Jesus had a people and race,

The last men of the West lacked all commitment.

They heard the drumming and they turned their face

Toward the inner fantasies of flesh.

The Schopenhauerian will comes from the bush

“In all its profligate and needless beauty

To encourage love to spill out everywhere.

Now I, whose sole purpose was to do duty,

Reflect and do not work against culture.

So I became a modern servile body

And fell to lust for prostitutes like her

Who had me blinded when she cut my hair

“I was unable to stop thinking of her

I could not make sense of her beauty’s purpose,

I entered the fantasmagoria

And rather than go to what transcends us,

The means of generation, Deliliah,

Her breast, her thigh, the kindness of her voice

Subsumed and blinded me, and made me weak.”

His discourse ended, he no longer spoke.

The two of us were running on the way.

And like long distance runners churned the ground

Which had become dry outside Salisbury

And that cathedral. When I looked around

Considering the brilliance of the sky

The vast plains opening up, I felt God’s mind

And felt desire for more begin to grow.

This chapter ends, another will follow.