Poetry

Apocalypse 9

The Reverend Buckland found the skeleton

Of Paviland’s red lady in the Gower.

He guessed the small remains were those of one

A prostitute, who had been killed elsewhere,

A recent death. The necklaces and bone

In fact, for he was wrong, were buried there

With rituals and words for a dead king

Forty thousand years prior, by carbon dating.

The last I knew, the cave was on the coast.

But when the king lived there it was savanah;

With woolly mammoths and those massive cats

Which grew luxuriously as megafauna.

Now, ghosts were in the dark holding debates

And at the cave mouth sitting, eating dinner.

They talked excitedly between their laughter

About the past and what was coming after.

My lord considered them: ‘Can you believe

These are the origins of human being,

These unfurred people are Adam and Eve

By simple virtue of the things they are doing?

Their talk and language is a solid proof.

A year before this day, they knew nothing

They could not love though they knew how to mate

They were aggrieved, but they could never hate.

‘The unforeseen gift of human language

Descended on them fully formed from God.

A prehistoric and linguistic wedge

Distinguishes a human from a brute.

Talking and mind are not a privilege

That he acquired by chance or by effort

Or evolution in a random way

But they are things dropped from eternity.

‘Language arrived and everything was changed.

Man became godlike with God’s intellect.

But like a loan his holy life is arranged,

The giver’s men are coming to collect.’

These, from nature ecstatically estranged,

Lithe and fully conscious, standing erect

Were not bankrupted right then where they stood,

The rider stopped his troops, shaking his head.

I saw the army pass them. ‘Do you think

That thoughts derive from words and so from speech?’

I said, ‘So language is the thing to thank

For what I am and what I know as such?’

And he: ‘What gives a man the highest rank

In life, in being, by law, by just as much

As his mind and language is knowing right

In such a way that knowing is in the heart.

‘Now see, these first born facing the bailiff,

Final demands for payment will be made,

But watch this proto-Adam and this Eve.

The first man was made perfect in the head.

His mind was God’s and that was good enough.

The pure man knew things inward and outward

As ideal things, things made to an ideal;

He was clean and pure to himself as well.

‘He knew what’s good, and he knew how to act.

The things he thought were those of the creator.

And that is what good means. But here’s the fact:

These aren’t the very first created pair,

They have ancestral sin. You recollect

How Adam loved his wife with love so sore

He chose to join her, knowing it was bad,

He chose the wrong path, being compassionate.

See now,’ my leader pointed to the den:

The early human male embraced his wife,

And little ones were playing near them twain,

‘This man has sacrificed his little life

Because he needs the solace of woman

And she has wanted him on her behalf.

Through good and bad, they’ll work their problems out

Although with God they’re falling into debt.

‘These are the unavoidable wages

Of sin, and no man ever lived in credit.’

And at that as a man turns over pages

Of a book leaf by leaf so he can read it

The undead army and its savages

Moved on the family and there undid it.

But I had seen these miseries before

And did not weep though it hurt me full sore.

O reader, in my view, the USA

Has got our language and it does decline.

But the Americans are not in any way

Responsible for making us such swine.

We gave our empire to the CIA

And we let Hollywood teach us our tongue.

Our thought is stripped of all its subtlety

And this results in our servility.

In better days a great man would appear

And make my countrymen use their conscience.

Now, while I watched the armies, that premier

Of Britain from its days of dominance

That Palmerstone who sent men to Crimea

To maintain British power abaft the Russians

Came in my head when I was thinking thus,

Think of the devil and, Lo, he appears.

I saw him at the back of that melee

Trying to hide and get a second wind,

And as he knelt and went as if to lie, A batch of spirits gathered all around,

And pushed him upright, moving him our way.

‘Sir,’ I said, giving him my outstretched hand

‘It was not my desire to bring you here

I did not seek the chance to have your ear.

‘If I can help, I will.’ Then he to me:

‘There is no help. I cannot reconcile

The way things are with how they used to be.

This is the afterlife we feared, this hell.

When I deployed the British to Shanghai

And motivated England to do well

To ravish every limb and breast of earth

I had not been preparing for this drought.

‘Tell me, you might be a religious man,

Has this procession just snuffed out all talk,

Has time rolled back so far?’ I was as one,

Whose words come rushing out wide of the mark

Excited, saying: ‘I myself was in

Hong Kong and Shanghai when I was at work

And went there with my business when I was

A manager of Shropshire factories.’

‘It was all business,’ he said wearily

‘I never did things with a moral purpose

I do not recollect a policy,

And yet no opportunity escaped us

To take advantage of an enemy

And motivate the people in the papers.

I am glad to talk and hear an English voice

Here, back in time, what, sixty thousand years.

‘And one more thing I say in my defence

We were not like that generation yet,

Which took Johannesburg by violence,

And used the Maxim gun inside Tibet

Marching to Llasa though it made no sense.’

And I replied: ‘You should have no regret.

My greatgrandfather was in India

And back in Britain wished he was still there.

‘At seventy-five he died, but still obsessed,

With army life on the North West Frontier.’

And he: ‘If only I could get some rest.’

He turned and walked. And then my good master:

‘We’re going to learn what kind of mind is best

You’ll learn or die, whichever is the faster.

We’ll move on back in time, like those explorers

Those natural seekers, those who came before us.’