Poetry

Judgement 20

I watched while leaning on the church yard wall.

From time to time a soul would hurry on,

And sometimes one or two of these would fall

Onto his knees and elbows, belly down.

Just as Tibetan Buddhist people crawl

When they take years to journey to a shrine,

So some of these made their perambulation.

A district judge, the Family Division

Who called himself Judge Sanders, was down there

Labouring away to move in spite of this.

I spoke to him, and said: “What have we here?”

He shied away and tried to hide his face.

“What made you crawl?” I said. Let us be clear

I suffered once this man’s type of justice,

And thought it was very appropriate

That I was up and he was down, and yet

He answered me: “I’m here for barratry.

We used to use the law for evil ends.

A judge’s job is to protect property

Belonging to the people on his lands,

But in the last years, lawyers used to try

To put the British life into the hands

Of muslims, here for money and to claim,

And to steal England, when enough have come.

“That’s how the law was used in later days:

To engineer the opposite of law.

We saw it in the court, the two of us,

How kinship ties, of father and daughter,

And son and father, had no legal force.

I’m sorry, now.” His knees and arms were raw

And yet he dragged himself on while we talked.

“Durham is next,” he said. “I recollect

“This woman moving just ahead of me,

Was known to you as DJ Mornington.”

I thought to leave and not to say goodbye,

But he said, “Hey, that’s Vladimir Putin.

Him walking there, the West’s arch enemy

Whose soldiers pressed the nuclear button

On his instructions, and were blessed by priests;

Whose nuclear soldiers were not atheists

“But loved their country and were bold as brass

Because they knew there was an afterlife,

And took communion daily on their base.”

He talked like this, but I had heard enough:

“My family, my worship, and my house,

You tried to take them and my other stuff,

As if imagining I would not mind.

But it is over. Now you understand.”

It was toward the evening of the day

I walked on quickly, moving toward Durham.

Judges, solicitors, I passed them by

At intervals, and Mornington the muslim

She struggled badly, panting where she lay.

I thought of asking her about her Islam

A foreign international concern

But did not, leaving her to learn alone.

The twin towers of the cathedral were stood,

As distant and as formal as the stars,

And I went there. I met Venerable Bede,

Who wrote of England in its earliest years;

His stone closed casket used to be inside.

I asked him this: “Master, tell me the cause

First, of these buildings and why they were built

And second, why they outlasted the world.”

And he: “They are the eternal afterlife

Made with the tools and stuff we had to hand.

These monasteries were made in the belief

That men could bring down heaven to the land.

And second, they are still here, hanging tough,

Because God likes them. That is why they stand.

Come in, and celebrate the Pentecost.”

I went inside, to celebrate that feast.

He said to me: “This holiday brings back

The Word and Father talking in their joy.

That joy is Spirit, born from out their talk:

The Creator told our Lord to make the sky

To make the earth and treat it as his work.

And later, he was born here, as a boy.

When Spirit comes it brings us intellect

It teaches us to see and recollect.”

“What do we see?” I said, “I saw,” he said

“That life on earth was not the end of it.

I saw the eternal world where are the dead.”

And I: “Is that the main thing Jesus taught?”

And he: “Yes.” Then I: “Can a bridge be made

Between the eternal and the temporal part?”

And he: “In the old kingdom of the earth

We mostly thought there was no second birth

“And people think you vanish when you die.

They intimate a higher sort of being

And intersections of eternity

With time, but mostly fear this simple thing:

You wake up somewhere when you pass away.

The signs were everywhere that doubt was wrong.

See how the Theotokos cared for you;

To her you were the image of her boy.

“When Jesus used to work at healing men,

He spent hours at it, sometimes, very tired.

He used to walk the street and the mountain

And speak, and heal, and teach what people need,

He grew exhausted, often on his own.

And it was just the same thing when he died.

His mother, when she sees you do the same,

She cares for you and acts from outside time.

“The timeless, spaceless, endless place is real.

And abbeys and cathedrals bring it here.

The other kingdom makes a dim appeal

And works in secret often.” “If I saw,”

I said, “the action of the Spirit palpable,

I would most likely lose my mind in fear

Because it would be I who saw, alone.”

In movies when a man puts down the phone,

I mean in films made in the USA,

He never says ‘goodbye’ or bids adieu,

As we in England do habitually;

So Bede left me, using the open door,

To meditate what Spirit has to say

About the main job that we have to do:

I thought about what comes when earth is gone

Which was about to happen very soon.