Poetry

Judgement 10

‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee

Blessed art thou among women and blessed is

The fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary

Mother of God, pray for us sinners now

And at the hour of our death,’ in this way,

The angel spoke and would not let me pass

Toward the Thames and on toward the Temple

Until I learned to pray by his example.

The bodiless messenger took my pack,

Reciting that petition all the while,

Removed a weight from it, then gave it back.

What you can sense is the phenomenal.

You hear it, you can feel it, you can look.

But there are things the senses don’t reveal.

You have to think and use your brains and thoughts

To find the meaning, and to join the dots.

But it is better that you do not look.

The true reality, the inner meaning,

The total picture is hard, so to speak.

The purely noumenal is terrifying

It’s hidden, outside, beyond, hard to take

And just as blood that runs out leads to dying

Just so the secret workings of our life

Should be repressed, for men aren’t strong enough.

And this is what the Spirit said to me:

‘The afterlife is very noumenal.

The secret structure of reality

Is shown to you, shameless, naked, in full.

And here, see how the ladder to the sky

Was simply this: to pray to this one girl.

And verily you find your way to God.’

My soul spoke so; I think I understood.

Ahead, a mile away, was St Paul’s church.

But as I closed on it crowds of the dead

Were in the way. It was an open marsh

All waterlogged, and like thick grass they stood

These souls; and they were lacking any flesh

All skeletal, their lips had receded

And you could see their shoulder bones protrude;

Wasted, the neck could not support the head.

And they were looking at the distant shrine.

‘My soul,’ I said, ‘I made my way down here

To London in my youth, like many men

The economic migrants who desire

The fame, the influence you can attain

In London. To be the Prime Minister.

Look at it now, four hundred million years

Have passed and it belongs to these creatures.’

The hungry people with translucent skin

Were stood in pools where armoured lice and crabs,

Fought and scurried, things from the Cambrian,

These little things the ancestors perhaps

Of human kind in dark oblivion.

I had no choice except to lead my steps

Between those starving skeletons toward

The white tower and to make my way inside.

Inside, a dozen figures tried to rest

But one stood up: ‘You’re Queen Elizabeth,’

I said: ‘You will recover at this feast.

You were the monarch of my land of birth

I met you once or twice in life at least,

The sovereign of the happiest land on earth.’

And she: ‘Here and while time lasts, you can watch

The offering of Mary to the church.

‘Remind me, what the date was when history

Was shut down finished off and all rolled up?

I see the past, and dim futurity,

But, dying of old age, I was asleep,

And not alert or conscious of the day.

What was it like when God made the world stop?’

And I said: ‘In the twenty second year

An afternoon in early October.

‘A fortnight after they had buried you.

You could say that the world died when you did.’

Then she said this: ‘I have, it seems to me,

Been starving here with an insatiate greed

For many lifetimes. All time goes so slow

But there is the prospect that I will be freed.

In life, I suffered from the rich man’s fear:

That I would lose it all, so I wanted more.

‘The rich person, a woman, is a bone

The dog of avarice chews on all day.

Instead of training to be like God’s son,

The wealthy one consults the day’s FT,

And calls her hedge fund manager by phone.

It was a commercial society

That I was ruling over,’ so she spoke,

‘And now I’m hungry for the Spirit’s sake.’

Now crawling weakly to us, whimpering,

As you imagine that Odysseus' dog

Welcomed his master, lying in the dung,

Another wasted form began to speak:

‘I overheard you talking. Am I wrong

Or can you tell me what path England took

After my death? I was that Lord Cromwell

And I am blind to what occurred as well.

‘We seem to know our past lives and to know

That knowledge most familiar in our time.

But things that followed hide in secrecy.

These others here don’t care to talk, and some

Are simply stupid. Tell the history.’

To see to the Lord Protector drag his frame

Along the ground and be so weak as this

I had to turn away to hide my tears.

And then, I knelt down: ‘Being Christians

The English made the first and only state

Where every man was granted innocence

Because he was the property of God.

They quickly mastered all lands and oceans.’

He smiled, ‘That’s good to know. It was my fate

To turn from Mary and the sacraments;

But now I learn again. Now, I could tell

The future and the things that would befall

15 ‘If God had not wound up his enterprise;

Somehow, I know what would have come about

If nuclear war had not closed all our eyes.

But, what of that? What could we learn from that?

We all are Orthodox now, and our errors

The Articles which kept Catholics out

And other shibboleths are in the past.’

Then he gave up, and took his chance to rest.

The smile that Cromwell made I seemed to smile

When I recalled the good which St Mary

Had done for me; the church was full

But she was not around for me to see.

The noumenal truth, intelligible,

Was clear to me now, and had used to be.

But happiness like this remains secret

Because I cannot explain it as yet.

I made my way out and my soul was there

Beside me, as the Holy Ghost to me.

I met another leaning at the door.

‘I have been waiting. I would go with thee,

But I have time to do, honouring her.

I am your Taid, they once called me Ozzie.’

And I: ‘Are you here for your avarice?’

And he: ‘Your Greeks, were they the Chosen race?

‘Before the time I was a Royal Marine,

Byzantium had come into our hands.

As did Jerusalem and Babylon

And other Ottoman cities and lands.

We gave the city up for lack of men.

Remember that. Now we have different ends

You go that way, and I will tarry here.’

And those were all the words we had to share.