Poetry

Resurrection 10

I planned to go to Moscow and join the war

Because the courts were going to take my house.

I chose to take my talents over there

And take the pay and orders from our foes.

But the Perennial Philosophy

Of silent being was the better choice.

Existence has a face, it is a person

The world is hypostatic and has reason.

The echoing song of the I AM is what

The world is. It’s the WORD said by the Son

And not impersonal or cold and quiet.

All time and space is human. Look, discern

The Russian royal martyrs proving it:

The children there, the brothers, each thrown down,

The princess St Elizabeth, down a well

Justice and evil struggling wall to wall.

Justice designed and still supports our life.

Divine right rules the living and dead

And yet regardless with a careless laugh

I wanted to do my own thing instead.

Recall, I was beneath a starry roof,

I found myself before Saint Winifred,

But subtly moved, by physical attraction

To revery and solitary abstraction

Like someone sweating, making a fast pace

In some remote mountain, sees from afar

A woman walking; on her breast and thighs

Black coverings, to her shoulder falls her hair,

Red brown her skin, an open youthful face

Led by a hunting dog; there is desire:

To be a mindless servant of that person

Forgetful of the hot sun and all reason,

As Artemis or some such pagan god

Could ruin men and wipe away their past

With one glance, or a movement of the head,

Or stir up youthful feelings in the breast.

Just so it was when that St Winifred

Was looking at me. But it was a test,

Justice and mercy are so beautiful

Lust can go right or it can make you fall.

If beauty is not in the mind which looks,

Then beauty cannot be observed or seen.

Nobody sees the sunlight if he lacks

The senses and the need to see the sun

When sun goes down or when the morning breaks.

And then the saint spoke: “The imagination

Must contain justice, creative and pure

Not obsessive and rotted with desire.

“Justice is real and it is an idea

Let me express it by a tale from Rome.

The last king’s son abducted Lucretia;

She killed herself once she had told her shame.

And justice has such potency down here,

That no more kings reigned once men captured him.

And Caradog, who ravished me and killed me,

And those who killed the Russian Royal family

“And saints of many places prove the point,

That God and men cannot act otherwise

When justice really gives them an intent.”

And there they were, there, right before my eyes

The Royal martyrs. “But,” I asked the saint:

“How come the murders and the rapes arise?”

And she: “Men snuff the candle of their light

And cannot see or know the good and the right.

“Most often physical and sensual love

Confuses them. So, evil is their aim.”

Andrei Kelin was there and as above

The emperor with his family round him

Raised from the dead. And this just goes to prove

That atheists here and in the age to come

Always do wrong and always fail in the end.

There, Kelin, whom I knew, gave me his hand

Who had expected peace and conversation

Before the end of time with British men.

See how famous and envied was our nation

Before that end, for we had mostly done

The will of Christ in our common sense fashion.

When Christ said men are equal, every one,

When stood before a judge and facing trial,

Regardless of the judge’s private will;

When he said everyone is free of guilt

Until his peers and equals prove he’s not,

Christ ordered this. It’s how the world was built.

“I am amazed,” I said, “to really meet

Renowned and holy people.” Then my child:

“Father, Locke said the senses dominate

The mind, but he was wrong. The intellect

Imposes what it wants on sense in fact.

“And, here, existence is presenting you

With what you need. You are the origin

Of all existence.” “How can this be so?”

I said, and she: “From imagination

The world is made, God thinks it through and through,

Likewise, in our case, by inspiration

We make our fate and share the divine power,

On earth a little bit, and here much more.”

“Where is this inspiration to be found,

To make a good world shaped from deep inside?”

I asked the child, and she: “To still the mind

And link up quietly with our God.

That’s how to do it.” Reader, I remind

Both you and me of what the child had said.

The Father makes the world that we perceive

But we make that world too with a works of love.

How I, tired often, ultimately came,

Sick of the work at factory and office,

To sit at Bala Lake. It was the time

My grandparents had died, and fatherless,

And being estranged from my ancestral home,

I went to Llyn Tegid in my distress

Which happened only through an intuition

That I was sick and had to learn to listen

At Bala I sat down, as on a mattress,

And dreamed of better things. In later days

I have gone looking for it on Cader Idris,

Where if you stay the night, the legend says,

The place makes you a poet or a nutcase.

So, I went dark, to where my childhood was

Or in the bedroom, or inside the prison,

And stayed with God who gave me proper vision.

I go up to the mountain top alone.

And for the lovely woman, to the muse,

And listening to the silence on my own

I am not ravished by outward beauties

But by the inner appetence within

To find the longing for the good because

Through this inactive action all the strings

Of my imagination cause the things

Of the outside and mute created earth

To form themselves into a better fate.

We talk without the bitter sound of death

My God and I, to avoid sin and do right.

Justice is added to me in my breath.

Just then I asked the child: “When shall we meet

The Father in Himself, when will I see

Without an intervening shield?” and she:

“Jesus is God, of course. He looks like you,

The Personhood of things lives in a man.

But there are ways of making this more true

By going deep inside, away from sin.

Why do you keep on wanting to apply

The violence of a search, to hit upon

The exact precise location or appearance

Of Him, when he has been with you long since?”