Poetry

Judgement 21

You who read this, you must still be alive;

A time and place to come or in the past.

I cannot understand how you survive.

But worlds go on, and miracles exist,

So it is possible supernal love

For you has let the universe persist.

Though miracles like that are best kept hidden:

The telling might as well have been forbidden.

Nobody else should know the mystery

Of how you bargained for the world’s future.

But me, I saw the entire catastrophe;

How Earth, which is a planet wanderer,

Like other mobile lights across the sky,

Delaminated at the appointed hour.

I saw it break apart in chunks and skins

And saw its parts, its sky roads, and its ruins.

It cycles round a star we call the Sun

In orbit in an elliptical course,

A path between falling, spiralling down,

And going straight into the universe.

The laws of gravity and of motion,

Describe the secret of this double force

Which keeps it moving in the empty sky

Along a flat and circular pathway.

And as it moves through its orbital plane

It spins on its own axis like a top,

Forever tilted to or from the sun

By twenty-five degrees; a gyroscope

Will keep itself upright when in a spin,

But earth turns like a rugby player’s lob,

And over nearly thirty thousand years

Its axis wobbles unto different stars.

Where north is now, thirty degrees of arc

From there, is where the north will be one day.

The tilt of earth is why the day goes dark

So soon in winter as it leans away,

And why the land goes cold. When light comes back

It leans toward the sun one summer’s day

At solstice. Now it used to be the case

When Christ lived, that the sun rose in Pisces

But it is in the Water Bearer now.

There are twelve houses where the sun can rise;

But these things were appropriate things to know

When pagans looked for gods within the skies.

The Earth was made four billion years ago

And living things three billion more or less.

Before that, Earth was unshaped space debris,

All dust and rock shards where stars used to be.

And this is water: once, some oxygen

Was crushed and forged inside some hellish place,

Then joined to H in some star explosion;

It drifted through the skies in blocks of ice

Before it smashed to earth and turned again

To gas or water. When I tell you this

I saw it happening in reverse order

As earth was drained slowly of all its water.

I went from Durham as all this occurred,

And walked to Manchester and Liverpool,

Unreal places, islands that God made

As earth collapsed, to make me his love’s fool.

To keep me safe, these islands were prepared,

Just as the world was made once as a whole:

To keep us near, and safe, while all around

Was non-existence, terror, all unbound.

So, when I saw at last the evidence

That I was living though the whole world died,

And I was healthy in its decadence,

I knew God’s love for once, and should have cried.

But let us deal with this and such events

That followed Durham when the time is right.

Just now, I tell you, there is hope and life

Which is reserved for those who can believe.

If you were with me as I went alone

The last few years of Earth and its collapse,

You could have seen and lived as I have done

But only if you trusted God, perhaps.

It was not possible to carry on

In any other way in that eclipse:

I made my way in light, but without faith

I would have suffered fatal endless death.

As earth faded away, there were still stars;

And as I picked my way through deep valleys,

And scrambled up the dry and burning scars,

I found my path. It was not even days

But from the start to the finish merely hours,

Til I arrived at my next stopping place.

But I must tell my reader how I met

The blind John Milton, there, the epic poet.

I passed him on the road, and asked him this:

“Why are you yet blind, father?” he replied:

“I never asked the Lord to heal my eyes.

I serve and trust him, and ask no reward.”

I said that “The celestial areas

Are all that will exist soon.” Then he said:

“The Greeks and Latins used to say that Mars

And Venus and the Moon and the Fixed Stars

“Were filled with God and saints, pirn in a gyre.

And you have read how Dante pictured heaven;

But, I am not convinced that God’s empire

Is confined to the stars and the empyrean.

For, the greatest happiness I ever saw

Was in the youth and joy of my children:

The happiness I felt reminded me

Of that stern duty known as chivalry

“To serve the weak and see your joy in theirs.

Beside the raising of a little child

To man or womanhood, nothing compares -

The afterlife is something of that kind.

I would have written this, if civil wars

And other politics weren’t on my mind.

I had set out to sing King Arthur’s rule,

But when the time came, all I knew was Hell.”

And I said: “After you, good English men

Turned to the sea, and having beaten France,

Dispensed with Holland, and defeated Spain,

Took full advantage of open sea lanes,

To gather wealth or else to settle down

In foreign places. None of that remains.

Their wealth, their ships, and, now, even the sea.

But it was something worth some poetry.”