Poetry

Judgement 11

If I am dead, then how did I write this?

You ask me that? Aristotle explained

That the impossible is writ in verse

While prose expresses things which have happened;

This poem shows impossibilities

Which will become real for us in the end.

My afterlife concerns me in the main

Because I was there, but when it’s your turn

The afterlife will shed its light on you.

I’ve given forty four songs, and my job

Is to reveal what happens when we die

In fifty six more, so I can’t give up.

I’m not half way, I have to see it through.

Shortly, I must describe that evil group

Of fallen angels, confront Lucifer;

See happinesses that I cannot bear.

In this song I will tell you of the pledge

That we survive the winter of the year.

Once every year things die and disengage

And at his roots the soul trembles with fear

Of destitution in the current age:

Losing your hand hold on your children, or

The debts which suck you dry of all your youth,

And make you distrust God and lose the faith.

Some six or seven hundred million times

The Earth had gone backward around the sun,

And space compressed backward. My tale resumes:

“Grandparent,” I said, “Here is no cause to mourn,

Don’t leave me yet; you gave me all my names,

So tell your life.” Now he was leaning on

The door frame of the white church of St Paul’s

And the Holy Ghost pressed what he said, as follows:

“We’ll walk on, to the next stage. Just as coke

Is mixed with iron to make it hard to bend;

And just as lime should be baked in the brick

To make it impermeable, we two blend.

Three score years I lived, then God took me back;

Your youth occurred without me being around.

In Rhondda, Tonypandy I was born,

And went to sea and not down the coal mine.

“As infantry, at various ships and ports,

For five years during the entre deux guerres,

I passed my life at sea in foreign parts.

But on the coast of France (it is not clear,

I cannot clearly see, and it still hurts),

There, some explosion from that far off war

Had blasted shrapnel deep into my head.

Though I lived on, I was an invalid.

“For thirty years I lived on, met your Nain,

Had two sons by her, and a little house.

And worked at Brymbo with the other men;

With epilepsy, when the metal shards

Short circuited the pathways of my brain.

I died slowly of those awful seizures.

I wanted to go on, I do declare,

To see you right, and be with you back there.”

A man gets up among the piles of bones

Goes to the altar, where the cup, the chalice

Is by the mother of God, and a light shines

Green moss light of the native oak forest

And as the shambling man eats he begins

To fatten up. I said: “That’s Wagner, that is.

That man there at the alter, there I know him

He did the words and music for the poem

“About the holy fool, Sir Parsifal.

An anti-Semite for most of his course,

A socialist he was, but after all,

He turned to God, and turned from avarice.”

I watched him bow low and then leave that hall.

“Do you think that the hatred of the Jews

Was justified in Germany?” I asked.

And he: “In my day, Jews were often mixed

“With all the rotten aspects of a state,

Namely the banking, lending, foreclosing.

Disraeli served the British potentate

And Rothschild served the cash for everything.

That’s how it was. But the anti-Semite,

If he imagines Jews did any wrong

To any state on their initiative

Misunderstands how men always behave.

“Just as the villages of England were

Shut down and all the public land was taken

Despite the protests and the common law,

And that it left the land poverty stricken,

Just so the towns were desolate and bare

When mines and quarries, factories were broken,

And closed and sold. A plague falls on the town

And all the people rootless and cast down.

“These dark calamities don’t come with Jews.”

And I said: “In my time, the biggest firms

Were money lenders, and our industries

Were banks, solicitors, rather than farms

Or factories, or other things of use.”

We walked on, contemplating on these themes

How that the nation is deprived of soil

Soliciting our food from daily toil

And how the circuit of productive work

Goes via printed money got by loans

And usury is the life blood of the folk.

Until the nation has no self-defence.

But let the histories take up the slack.

We were at Canterbury. From a distance

I saw the Cross raised up; it was the feast

Where Helen brought the cross from out the east

And set it up at Constantinople.

The second day was drawing to a close

The night came, hot, almost unbearable.

My conscience, or the Spirit said to us

That we should part, although inseparable.

Just as a soldier or civilian goes

To Dover for a boat to France and onward

And he anticipates more heat and light abroad

Than he is used to feeling in England,

Off to the Balkans or the Fertile Crescent,

Just so right there the heat fell all around

Just like a blanket heavy and unpleasant.

My burden hurt my shoulders and my mind

Some loads a man loves, and some loads he doesn’t;

For, women grow strong arms carrying a child

And soldiers learn to like the kit they hold,

But that weight that I carried hurt me sore,

And sweat was in my eyes, blurring my sight.

And when I came near to the Temple door

An angel stopped me. “You will have to wait.

No entrance, keep your pack on, go up there.”

The being of light gestured, and put me right.

And just as feathered birds line up at autumn

And sit on power cables for a time

As they take rest and gather in their flocks

Before they move on south to Africa,

So, there were hundreds sitting on the rocks

All lined up silently. I joined them there.

“Who are these people, what unfinished task

Are we condemned and judged for, waiting here?”

I asked one at the end of that long line;

“And when will I be able to go? When?”

And my companion, birdlike, answered me:

“These here, including me, showed apathy;

Late converts, low responsibility.

Refusing to be guided and to be

Christian, until too late.” I cannot say

How long I waited there. I think of me

All hot and dry, and feathered up with dust,

Facing toward the temple and the Cross.