Poetry

Resurrection 29

There were no snakes and ladders after that.

Still, I went out and started walking south

Along the beaches, cliffs and estuaries,

To Aberystwyth castle, without guide.

To the penultimate of these lodges

The stopping places of my divine mission.

Eight stations there would be, and this the seventh,

Eight houses in the ring around my kingdom.

Over the hill, and being almost home

My mind went walking on a mental track

Away from where my actual feet were falling,

Imagining my wife somewhere behind

Always a hundred meters at my back.

That’s how we used to walk, me as it were

An Arab man in front, and following

At a respectful distance, came my spouse.

You see them walking hand in hand most times;

The human being comes in hunting pairs.

But Galya and I were separate.

Like moon and earth, one orbitting the other.

Back there I saw her smelling some wild flower

Or pressing buttons on her camera

She’s altering her Nordic walking sticks,

Or dodging obstacles I had not noticed.

The photographs she took were meant for home

To send back to her friends where she came from.

She loved my country! Breathing the sea air

And putting water on her face for blessing.

“Come on, just hurry up!” I used to shout.

She never listened. Her full hips were not

As suited to this business as my own.

We looked broadly the same, but we were not.

A chimp is shorter than a human being

And looks the same in a generic way

But his arms and legs are harder by five times.

She is made for bearing children and for kindness.

She is complete, entire and self contained

When bearing children. Men are incomplete

Always in want, restless, and passionate.

But women are sufficient to themselves.

Unfinished, fractured, empty on the inside

A man is always fighting with desire.

Half built and sometimes desperate and mad.

But she was gentle and concerned for me

Giving that still perfection to my life

Bringing an order; making friends for me,

Lighting the fire and bringing me my chop.

I could not do without, although I tried.

She opens the door for proper social life

So that the women are the Church’s life

The bride of Christ is what the Church still is

Tending the fire where God puts up his feet.

She was not all that old, my Babushka.

Thus I was thinking as I walked along.

And how she loved her son, with a cold heart

To annihilate whatever threatened him.

Her gentle darkness takes the edge off light

When I am staring too much at the sun.

Her slow affection out of Palestine

From many ages fell on me like night

At the end of the day to signify the time

To rest and sleep. She is attractive then.

And that is why she will never be a priest

There never can be women in the priesthood.

How can a woman so perfect and finished

And so entirely human understand?

A man, being all confused and unfulfilled,

Alone can mix himself with God and death.

As night came on I saw a tall thin man

Walking ahead of me, and at my back

I felt the presence of my Galya walking.

The iron roads, the thick blown grassy banks

A squat medieval chapel with thick walls

From the age when English kings were speaking French,

With oak doors and no windows had to serve

As hostel for me when it fell midnight.

It rained outside, and I began to think

How the God of all this world came down from heaven,

But did not just appear by miracle

Rather, gestated in a woman’s womb.

The perfect human that one must have been.

Like Galya, but the wife of God as it were.

Without complaint and with full acquiescence

She entirely submitted to her fate

Most honoured human being of them all

With an unmediated love for Jesus,

Her son, who went into Jerusalem

With people shouting that he was the king

“Hosannah in the highest” they had sung.

And how she mourned for him as my wife might

About her boy, she mourned for the creator.

“The world was ending, but you asked our Lord,

To come to my assistance where I lay

Flat out beneath the world’s ultimate end.

You interceded for me when my children

Prayed for your help. You listen to our prayers.

“He told me what you did. But prior to that

You asked for miracles on my account.

Like when I had exhausted every option

And could not find a means of saving them,

I prayed that you would take care of my children

And straight away, the day which followed that one,

You brought them to me, answering my prayer.

You intercede for us with miracles.

“That other time, hanging on my rope’s end

Above a vast abyss, far from the ground

When atheist beliefs had made me love

The wrong and bad in life more than the good,

You brought my Galya to me straight away

The week after the holy sacrament

Of new life was administered to me.

Straightway, immediately, without delay.

“Such are the miracles I have seen you do.”

So, in some Norman one-room church near Barmouth

I prayed and fell into a human darkness

And the forgetfulness of restful sleep,

Among the orderly predictable

Routine behaviours of the sea and sky

And day and night, and seasonal climate change,

In that peculiar way that humans have.