Poetry

Resurrection 11

I should not think of this judge or that judge

Not muslim M-ington nor S—son

Remembring I have cause to hold a grudge.

Peter Reading, I saw there, in person

Who died in poverty before old age

I found the poet had changed his persuasion

“God gave us this life for our happiness,”

He said, who had been so fierce for justice.

“I knew that it was true that law and right

Is coexistent with our consciousness.

Law is not a book, a rule to read or write,

But what we are. Yet how they made a mess,

The British, in the last days of the state.

Faithless, atheist. Yet I have reached this place

God gave us this life for our happiness.”

He said, a Shrophshire lad, a man of verse.

Now he was going from Flint out somewhere else,

A path through yellow summer grass towards

The flatlands and the coast of north east Wales.

Wind swept and grey skied, white light through the clouds

A place where my enthusiasm fails,

And I was heading home, when with these words

A voice hailed me: “You are not turning back?

Come, bring the children. Forwards, always attack.”

He smiled and reached his hand out to clasp mine.

The face I first saw as a child, a soldier

My grandfather, of my step-father’s line,

He was in uniform, but he was older

Than when he wore it once as a captain.

He went along with Stirling at his shoulder

And General Montgomery of that war

And Lord Mountbatten, too, all men who were

The soldiers of the last days of the flag

And empire. They had aimed to do a coup

To save the land from weakness and old age.

“Grandfather, we’ve seen justice, so we’ll go

Back home.” And he: “Rhuddlan next and courage.”

“Eight places?” I asked, “each one a virtue?”

“All of the places that the English king

Had built to capture and to do us wrong.”

He said: “We’ll visit them and free that world

And learn how to be freed from apathy

Or falling short, or sin, as it is called.

Come on, Rhuddlan is next, for bravery.”

In this man’s garden playing as a child

I stretched out basha shelters tree to tree

And set up traps for rabbits, and at school

Established my own kind of martial rule.

He wore two oakleaves on his campaign medals

For leadership in France and at Dresden.

And so, I followed, as a small boy follows

The tracks and paths made up by the wiser men.

“How like a dream this is. As if the shadows

And the hallucinations from within

The tired or sleeping mind had been composed

Into an actual world,” I said, and paused,

Because the child responded in this way:

“The knower and the knowing and the known

Are one thing when you meditate or pray.

There’s nothing outside, just you on your own

In that space what is real is what you see.

Vision to some extent depends upon

Freedom. Our creator makes all things new

And brought us here, together, me and you

“Ancestors and descendants, by the power

Of his imagination and good will.“

She spoke, we walked, and after hour on hour

Through all that paradise that I knew well

Of oak and ash tree clad hills there the tower

Of Rhuddlan was, a mile or so from Rhyl

Beyond St Asaph where mountains give way

To flat lands and the vastness of the sea.

Somebody chanted, or they sang these words:

“Holy God, Holy Strong, Holy Immortal,”

A song which came and went, falling backwards

Like wine dark waves crashing, blown upon a gale;

And those things singing seemed to look like birds

With six wings each that hovered by the castle.

I asked my guide, the child, for guide she was:

“Are those seraphim?” And she answered: “Yes.”

“Why does the place of courage need a guard?”

I asked, and she: “Against evil,” she said.

“What, even here there should be bad and good?”

And she: “But how should anyone be freed

Or how should anyone resemble God

Or try to get toward the Holy Lord,

Unless he also can chose to do bad,

And fail or fall short, as the Fallen did?”

But do not think that I am full of pride

When I describe the people that I saw

Ranging and going in on either side

Along with me. They filled my heart with awe!

Roland the knight of Charlemagne who died

Defending France’s borders from the Moor.

And Belisarius of eastern Rome

Who rescued Italy from total doom

For king Justinian. There was Richard First

The English knight who led the third crusade

To hold the holy land for God and Christ,

Now Francis Villon wrote a sweet ballad

Which asked where men like these were laid to rest

And where they were when they were wholly dead;

If I could, I would tell him what I saw

These Christian soldiers live for ever more

In that Elysium. “But it makes me think,”

I said to my grandfather, “of the ruin

Of England in my time, and how it sank,

A shipwrecked boat, which causes me such pain.

To see the people poor and without rank,

Invaded by their enemies from within.

Because I had loved it, and found meaning there,

It causes me more pain than I can bear.”

Now, Richard, whose bronze statue used to be

Outside Westminster Palace at Whitehall

He heard my words and heard my plaintive cry,

And, turning meward, said: “Did you hear tell

How I once tried to sell London for money

To pay for my defence of Israel?

A country should not matter to a man

As much as God does, and that relation.”