Poetry

Resurrection 15

As I was walking out of Conwy tower

Now educated by the virtuous light

Newly aware that Christian men defend

The lands and property of Christian people

And do right and do justly to the people

I was accompanied as it were by ghosts

Not ghosts in heaven, but in memories

Of what I saw and thought in previous times

I who when I was young wrote poesies

Of the demonic haunting of Westminster

By an antithesis of government

Which ruled from underground, the negative

The photographic film plate of the place.

Demons from underground did carnival.

So black was white, and white was black down there,

And they call evil good and good evil.

I who saw this and wrote about it once

Saw Westminster again, a gothic pile

Carved and laid out anew like a cathedral

Whose towers are English perpendicular,

Those towers which Wrexham parish church inspired

St Giles’ church where my people were baptised

And married and were buried in past times;

Just so the Palace in the afterlife.

All red sandstone and granite, near Conwy

Along the road to Anglesey it was.

The highest form of state, needless to say,

Where men talk and dispute freely together

As in the Roman senate, like the Greeks

Is what the politicians did inside.

A man as man is an unglamorous thing

A crude uninteresting animal

Unless he has a relationship with God

That dignifies him. So, my Gothic castle

Which points the way to God for those inside.

Once, I told how the earth was negative

A mirror image of which was below

Where savage creatures did a parody

Of our land’s government to mock and twist it

By serving an unnatural black mass.

My band, me and the children went to it

In the ideal world. We went along

Whitehall to look into the stained glass windows

And saw a king there, in command again.

A crooked back, a kind of scoliosis,

And scars from injuries across his face

With clawlike massive hands. “Richard the Third,”

My daughter said, “Our last and Christian king.

“He was discovered at the end of days

Unburied where he fell when they dug up

A car park on some barren land in Leicester.

His hands are strong, his back slightly deformed

From decades of the use of a broad sword;

A king who fought,” she said. He was enthroned.

And right and left on the opposing benches

His politicians knew him once again

“A humble man he was, who was betrayed,”

My son began, “As we were then betrayed.

And in the king’s place there was put mere man:

A careful politician took his place.

But Richard, when he saw the throne was lost

Shouted a challenge to the usurper

To fight him one on one as if they were

Still paladins or champions of the court

Of Britain’s Arthur or of Charlemagne."

Why do we meditate and pray? I know

There is no reward of any obvious type

And little proof it works; it is not like

The way a man can consummate his love

In some dry bed of sensuality,

Where men can draw a chalk mark on the bedpost.

You have to force yourself to pray at all

For something you could not call a result.

Except if you should set out to adore

The Theotokos, she who speaks for us,

You gets an outcome for us in the world.

I love her, sweetly smelling like the meadows

Outside my door, and perfect as the sun

At evening. Purity like this is beauty.

King Richard loved Christ’s mother in that way

And here, I saw that he had been consoled.

My girl was first to spot that Christian monarch;

She was the first to drag me to the doors

Leading me inside, like a teacher would,

To see two men who loitered on the threshold.

“That’s Byron, there,” she said, “of Newstead Abbey

Who lived there once the English wrecked the Church,

And thieving from it, made themselves grand lords,

But notwithstanding that, they remained thieves.

“The other man is Shelley.” They were listening

While leaning at the door posts of the Chamber

Listless and rakish while the Gospel was

Read out by one who led the ceremony.

“See how precarious England once was.

Our aristocracy did not invade

And take possession as great Norman lords

But when they wrecked the shrines,” Bryon began

When he had turned to me, and when the Gospel

Had been read out. “In life, or previous life,

They more and more repressed the antique past

By trying to forget their origins

And who had made them, I mean the Creator.”

But I said: “You should know, both atheist

And Peer of this place. How did you get here?”

His response: “I converted in the end

“To Orthodoxy, which my soldiers followed.

And, when I died, the Grecian priest was called

Who gave communion and said prayer for me

At Missolonghi where we fought together.”

He turned toward the nave-like rows of chairs

Within the chamber, pointing out MPs:

“That’s Bollingbroke, Pope’s friend, who in exile

Argued for the return of proper kings;

“And Pitt the Elder, Chatham, who designed

The British Empire in its early days.

There’s Milosevic, guardian of his nation

And of his church. He was pursued by NATO

Like other patriots, like Saddam Hussein,

Another international victim,

Whose country was invaded and laid waste.”

“I know it, I was there for both,” I said.

But there were many other politicians

Assembled. I do not have the time to tell,

But must relate the things that Shelley said

When I had asked him: “How did you survive?”

He said: “When I awoke at our doom’s day,

My steps led me downward into the earth,

Into a second death. That’s where I found

Ring upon ring of sinners, nine great rings;

“I was permitted to pass these unscathed,

And all the while I saw how God had formed

An organised and justice based creation.

Right down to Antenora and Caina,

And where Satan was standing at earth’s core.

I glimpsed the light and walked upward to that

Arriving at the foot of Purgatory

A mountain made from all the waste of hell.

“The garden at the top, and all those spheres

And divine bodies which surround the Earth,

I saw. How long this took I cannot say.

And then all time and space reversed and shrank,

Until at last I found myself alone

And in the ideal kingdom I have loved

Beyond the world of dreaming and desire

And all the stuff I left when I had drowned.”