The edge of reason
And beyond
Where all understanding
Of hatred and brutality
Of evil and of murder
Is challenged yet again.
A crash of cymbals
Circles our world
Where our disbelief
In such depths of evil
Leaves us spellbound
Helpless and appalled.
Overbalancing, falling
Beyond the edge of reason.
(On hearing of the latest school massacre,
this time in Texas. 25th May 2022).
[On arrival at The Pearly Gates!]
‘Ah, Johnson’,
The floating attendant beamed,
‘You’re here at last!
Now let me see
Let me peruse my chart
To find
Whether you have matched
Those hopes when you were hatched’.
I watched and scrutinised
The peering and the poring
The snorting and the sighing
And once, just once, a chuckle
Perhaps of disbelief as
I hoped I wouldn’t buckle
Beneath a mounting weight
Of such negative estimate.
‘Well, Johnson, it appears’,
After what seemed like years,
‘That you have so incandescently offended,
Not met that for which you were
So obviously…………. Intended’.
The clustered, powdery books around
Jigged and bucked and turned to grieve
And I, crestfallen, turned to leave.
But as I turned with misted eyes that could not see
I thought I felt a gentle hand enfolding me.
There’s fuel to spare and fine drinks aboard
Rushed take off time greets our furtive Lord.
He’s given his speech on climate change
Late for his jaunt at the Stock Exchange.
He leaps aboard and raw engines roar
The craft jerks up and begins to soar.
Perhaps his people far down below
Won’t notice sham and his shame aglow.
On Cheater’s private flying machine
He hopes no one knows where he has been.
North to the Moors then South to a club
East for shooting, West boarding a sub.
Our Prince distraught at our climate’s state
And reckons it’s all a tad too late.
He needs to speed to his dinner date
The chopper’s perfect to greet his mate.
So perhaps he’ll swerve the country’s fate
And escape the view he’s profligate.
Oh can’t you see that we give him cause
To milk we fools who give such applause.
“Climb in my chopper and whizz away
No one’s filming my smart getaway.
We’ve gone in a flash and loud ‘Allez’
Up, up and away; hip hip hooray!”
BABYLON AND THE LOST BABIES
The ongoing tragedy of lost babies isn’t the preserve of any one society but is
distressingly common. However, this set of three poems is a reflection on what
happened in the Republic of Ireland during part of the 20th Century, as described
in the recent Report into the running of Mother and Baby homes published by
the Irish Government in 2020.
It came to me that the first four letters of Babylon could link the lost babies to the
City of biblical renown. Something else links these babies to Babylon. Both the
babies and Babylon have disappeared almost without trace, yet their memory is
held firm in the minds of historians and archaeologists, together with a rapidly
diminishing number of relatives of the lost. It is reported that many of those who
disappeared were unlamented and unremarked by those who disposed of them.
I’ve imagined listening to these lost souls, people as human as you and I. This
history speaks to us, surely. The Songs of Babylon are a tearful journey of loss
and return.
SONGS OF BABYLON POEM 1
DID MY BABIES GO TO BABYLON?
Where have all those babies gone
Three-quarters ceased to be
Maybe they left for Babylon
Or perhaps they were lost at sea.
Lost babies lacking explanation
Couldn’t see living here shouldn’t be
Perhaps they live in Babylon
For indeed they are lost to me.
Did they leave from the nearest station?
Yet how did all of them flee?
How happy are they in Babylon?
Won’t they ever come home to me?
My darlings, my darlings, it cannot be
I lost you forever in ’43.
YES, I’VE RETURNED FROM BABYLON
Yes, I’ve returned from Babylon
Across a clutching sea
From Babylon, from Babylon
But nothing can I see.
I sense a sense that I’ve come home
I sense that I am me
I sense a hurt in my spirit’s roam
That’s in my history.
And something says I’m not alone
That others accompany me
But nothing shall my hurt atone
For I shall silent be.
But in my swirling, in my soul
There is a grievous mystery
I cannot act to gain control
My darkness heeds no plea.
Yes, I’ve returned from Babylon
But saints mean naught to me
I feel not love for love has gone
And leaves thus me and he and she.
AND I TOO AM FROM BABYLON
And I too am from Babylon
Another voice was heard to say
But Babylon is close at hand
And this is Judgment Day.
And now awake I think I see
Other souls are crying, calling
Searching out my Mother’s love
I know my soul is mourning.
New awake from the shovelled soil
My spirit struggles free
Hundreds of others are there here
To claim a destiny.
Do not affright those living now
Other whispering spirits say
We have woken fearingly
For this is Judgment Day.
Urgent round the dark sky dreaming
Souls now released are gathered near
Children standing pure and stilled
Pure justice lost shall reappear.
There you are
Upright
Implacable
Waiting.
Your hose arm
Curved
Skinny when
Compared.
Your cylinder
Ruddy
Shiny
Explanatory.
Explosive
Foaming
Action
As needed.
Invisible
Unregarded
Passed by
Yet crucial.
Fire! Fire!
Grab it!
Whoosh!
Escape.
The shadow ship slips silently
Across the deathly bay
And from her spars, amid the ropes
A tune was heard to play.
The tune piped out so mournfully
As night replaced the day
And from her depths the shadows came
To dance the night away.
The shadows bowed and whirled around
Their hazy coats pale grey
And tripped a hornpipe to the stars
On the thirty-first of May.
While mirthless was their laughter here
While fiendish was their play
My heart was filled with sadness deep
For the shadows of Botany Bay.
Perhaps I shall
See you once more unvexed
Unstained
Freed from the hurt of those
Smiling intoxicants
That, inter-laced with
Hateful drugs,
Have ravaged you.
You, if only now I could
Unhook you from
This Devil’s claws
Undraw your present state
Unwrite your foolish past
Wipe clean the pain
From your dear, wounded self
And those who weep for you.
Damn those untouchables
Whose harvest is
Our casual, vacant youth
Entering each viper’s lair
In bloated stupefaction
Insensible
Of their fateful stroke
Along the Devil’s mane.
Had I perhaps the blessed powers of Prospero
These maddened children saved; the Devils go.
She was never averse
To some scurrilous verse
Cursing the Count who had wronged her
She wished hot coals on his head
And dreamt he was dead
In Hell she believed he belonged there.
A wet herring could have knocked us down
When laughingly the girl leapt
Into the decembered sea
From the pier’s bleak end
On Hogmanay.
How mad is that?
Into the swell from our ice cold pier
Micha stepped out
With her plunging and deep sinking
And her late, late surfacing
Gasping and electric
Shrieking cold, with winter water burning.
“Aye, my flesh is dancing with delight
For the sea took me straight
Cutting down through weed and eels
Down, spiralling nearly to limpety rocks
Then whooshing up to life’s grey light
Super-shocked, I shout for joy!”
And here they come, moving quite overwhelmingly
Unhindered by creaky laws of science known to us
Out of a darkened sky to make our narrowed sight
Bleed at the fierce intensity of such pulsating light
Arriving as blazing flamingos slowing in a final rush
To stand, engulfing all around in a blind caress.
Useless stupefaction consumes those present here
And terror empties all from urgent thoughts to flee
Frozen watchers glimpse Earth’s new alien dawn
Our tomorrow, where alien tanks are on the lawn
Presuming annihilation, unless the living Christ is
Among these inward gods of travel, gods of space.
We plead to Heaven for Jesus, accumulating centuries
Of Angels now advancing, redrawing space and time.
[Not too long ago we were told that Earth was probably the only inhabited planet in the Universe.
Since then our understanding has broadened and deepened, with thousands of planets in the habitable zones of solar systems within the Milky Way having similar possibilities of life. As NASA and others have so much more of the Universe to investigate, we’ll very possibly be thinking of numbers on a hugely greater scale in the coming years.
Just as we have been reaching out into space for some time, isn’t it likely that other planets are doing the same? The intense thought struck me as to where that left our concept of God, Jesus and Heaven. Would we be rescued from an alien invasion? Or left to our own sinful devices and our newly altered destiny? Or perhaps we share our Lord and Jesus in our Heaven with all the other planets?]
I just missed treading on his gravestone
At least, on the corner I saw
Quite unattached the fragment’s alone
Not so far from the Cathedral door.
Clerics laid paths with these headstones
Drenched once with family tears
Now Tom’s not mourned by his loved ones
Gone themselves these two hundred years.
Whatever the whys and the wherefores
Tom’s history lies sadly shattered
His grave soul never claps in applause
Vandals triumphant when it mattered.
Silent lie the spirits of those beneath their stones content
Not they whose graves lie broken, snarling for argument.
Quick the armoured Angel comes, in majesty
Quite blazing up the shivering room
With a blinding incandescence
Dancing round His searing, wondrous form.
In trepidation peering, a heart so riven
My scalded, mortal eyes search His
And, seeking prophesies, I stand
Consumed in the Angel’s grace.
His feathered mail pulsing liquid gold
His wings, now furled, alive in brilliance
As chastening, illuminating my inner self
The Angel clarifies a newly burnished soul.
He reaches out to me, beckoning
Burning proud sins, I’m reckoning.
It’s here that life and death perhaps, weigh upon us, strangely still
So silently the twelve souls tick and measure snail-paced time
Until two more arrive to break the heartbeat of the ever waiting room
And so another joins and jolts us with her muted, half-heard voice
Not vital matters of the State but just an irksome quaver overheard.
Another, close by me, clicks her polished nails upon her shiny chair
In clicketty beat known only to her inner orchestra now grandly playing
Until she’s called, leaving the empty chair recovering from her form
Resuming life as a patient chair desiring to soothe, once more, another
As the twilight of time itself clicks on another notch with we who wait.
That beautiful face
Flawless
Sweet yet out of grace
Lawless.
A mind deformed
Empty of regret.
Evil unreformed
The Devil truly met.
Flashing fury
Mayhem bloody.
The nurse just gory
Another study.
So this is He
The Devil disguised.
The victim’s plea
Unrecognised.
Mischance and Beautiful Devil are a pair of poems describing the same event. They relate to a fine looking young man murdering a nurse, a complete stranger, who was standing at a bus stop in the Hospital car park on her way home. A photograph of the assailant accompanied the newspaper story and the combination of the murderer’s physical beauty and his evil struck me forcibly. His looks were angelic yet his actions were devilish. Her last experience of life was of being stabbed to death after she had completed her shift in which she was an angel of mercy. What causes one human being to wreak such murderous destiny on another?
What mischance, what mis-wiring of a human mind can bring
Such devastation, such vengeful passion on another’s head?
The Devil cloaked in beauty that could make the angels sing
Wreaked terror unprovoked, and cast the bird of evil on the wing.
(Mischance and Beautiful Devil are a pair of poems describing the same event. They relate to a fine looking young man murdering a nurse, a complete stranger, who was standing at a bus stop in the Hospital car park on her way home. A photograph of the assailant accompanied the newspaper story and the combination of the murderer’s physical beauty and his evil struck me forcibly. His looks were angelic yet his actions were devilish. Her last experience of life was of being stabbed to death after she had completed her shift in which she was an angel of mercy. What causes one human being to wreak such murderous destiny on another?)
I turned aside a beggar at our Pisa taxi rank
But later thought my repelling horror stank
As he tutted, swore and shuffled slow away
One chance encounter not to make our day.
I shuddered that he saw me and approached
Targeted when I was otherwise engrossed
Challenged as arbiter of this beggar’s fate
I chose to lordly point him to another gate.
Poor sod, who would have chosen Hell?
Wherein only tortured souls shall dwell
Where cents and hopes jockey emptiness
While his less is more but my more is less.
He was not the only beggar I so skilful skirt
Others too I skipped aside to miss their hurt
Skipped onto the other, more pleasant, side
And played the Levite to assuage my pride.
Well, arguments fly in to champion my part
While others note and scorn my frozen heart
Where lies an answer, find me one just reason
Perhaps we’ll travel soon, quite out of season.