Poetry

Resurrection 4

I said to him, “Where are the English saints?

A knight and scientist is what you are,

Here will we see some English immigrants

Who practiced the technology of prayer

And served God at the altar and in chants

And other ways of doing things back there?”

And he said: “I observed creation’s structure

And mathematics is a holy rapture

“After the schism and the reformation

What else was possible? The other rites

Were lost in England. That was our passion

To be English ascetics, cenobites,

With pen and astrolabe, a mathematician.

The unstudied world is like the impassioned heart

All muck and dirt and images of dream

Which pester you until the end of time

“And make a man a transient or a tramp

A bitter exile for his ignorance.

So I studied why the apple falls with a bump

Just as the orient Christian cast a glance

Toward the inside and the internal pump

Where the sacred fire of the heart core burns.

Just so we studied the astral cosmic sun.”

Then I said: “Yet it ended with ruin.

“The Protestant’s free choice to do his will

Turned gold to chemical and stopped ceremony

Put filth on noble things and beautiful.

There was no class, or rank, or mystery

And generally led us all to hell.”

And he: “See there, a woman comes this way.”

While I was working, and while Newton talked

My daughter watched, toward us Galya walked.

“Man cannot live by God alone,” she said

“You and this child, or You, God, or who knows?

This colony needs me, it has a need.

I am come to join you like in outer space.”

“This is not the right time to come on board,”

I answered, “You’re impassioned and jealous,”

And other things were said which are not worth

Repeating. “I will start to work the earth.”

She put a plough together with a wheel

And handles like a cart; there was a yoke

Made so as to employ an animal

And yet not strangulate the great beast’s neck.

A knife was hanging down into the soil

To cut the sod and turn it on its back

A special board rotated the cut clods.

The plough was also good for killing weeds.

It cut the weeds and hid them in the dirt.

Newton instructed, and she said to him:

“I know how it is done, I can do it.”

To break the clods she raked them into loam;

It was good soil, equal sand, clay and grit.

She put some grain seeds and manure with them

Casting them out, or in tidy row.

Manuring nitrogen helps them to grow.

“The grasses give us grains of many types:

As wheat or oats, or rye, barley, all fruit,

Grass fruit with floury flesh the same as grapes

But dry and small. But I am growing wheat.

At harvest, we will cut the stalks in groups,

With a curved scythe you swing down at your feet;

Then bundle up the fallen grass together

And take them in away from adverse weather.

“We did these things when I was just a girl,

In summer when I went back to the farm,

And that was why they closed the local school.

You lay the grassy wheat out in a barn,

And whack or thresh it with a threshing tool

Until the husks are separate from the grain.

Then throw them up, to winnow out the chaff.

A wind will blow away the lightweight stuff.

“Your grain needs to be milled and turned to flour.

There is a mill. There, two great stones rotate

One on the other, turned by water power.

They grind the wheat grains till the dust comes out.

Collect the white dust. The reward is here.

Mix it in water, it is fit to eat.

Or make a paste and heat it in an oven

For this is bread, flat bread, without a leaven.

“But add some yeast to make it bubble and rise -

Something to talk about another day.”

And do I need to tell you that all this

Was happening in an eternity

So, time was not an obstacle, nor space,

Doing and thinking simultaneously.

“There’s lots to say about the management

Of fields and fertiliser, but we won’t,

“Not yet,” she said. There was unleavened bread

And water, and a place of dried good rock.

And not the marshy land which I have heard

Can suck a man down if he dares to walk

On trackless unused ways. At time for bed

The great philosopher began our talk:

“How does a man who has more than one wife

Rejoin his true love in the afterlife?”

And I grew passionate: “The first was like

A gate without a hinge, a sinking bog;

She was not mine at all, but a mistake.

I had a wife and I was like her dog.

I lived outside. And she lived like a crook

Kept by the government to be its wag.

How that they interfere in family life

And give them money and places to live

“Such women claim to be mentally ill

And get more care and money for their cause

Aborting and divorcing as they will.

And at divorce, they take your house.

Now, statesmen, who arranged this living hell,

By buying all the children and your spouse,

Abjure the law of nature for the Party

Which lies in wait beyond the narrow way.

“But I have shown what happened to my soul

When I was married first. Broken city,

Apocalypse and everlasting hell.

Against nature, the king my enemy.

I do not know for sure, but I just feel

The better angels put Galya to me

To give me comfort and strength to my hand

To be a true wife in a dying land.”