A gift, a poem of today, for today, to be included in my next anthology, out this summer. Meanwhile, please see Cow-Tipping and the Deep Blue Sea and The Luminous Shadow of the Muse.
I
It looked exactly as Easter ought to look. The grey stone
rose up into the blue sky, the nave roof line peaking above
the rose-windowed vault, the pinnacles pointing toward
heaven. Against the buttresses, an enormous camellia,
vibrant pink, bloomed. Along the churchyard wall, daffodils'
yellow heads bobbed in the sunlight, dancing to a tune played
by passing traffic as there was no wind. All was still and
beautiful and springlike and almost holy.
II
This was the dream of my youth, the dream of an English
country church, beautiful in its combination of heavy stone
and traceried windows, set into a landscape of vibrant
greens, pinks, yellows and all topped with a sky the colour
of the sky blue Crayola crayon. Inside, there would be happy
families, listening to a sermon and possibly dozing for a
minute, then leaping up for communion, filing out, shaking
hands with the priest, going home for a big lunch in a
cosy house with pleasant relatives. It was a pipe dream.
III
Reality was more stark. A draconian Roman Catholic church,
borne in uncomfortable silence in years my father could
bear for us to go to a church that had failed him, bare modern
wood in a church that looked more like a bingo hall. The faithful
were more faithless than most people knew; I knew. The kids
bullied me on the playground, the adults teased me because
I was different. Because a sterile church in an impoverished
landscape was not enough for me. Because I got above myself,
they said. Thank goodness I held my own, held my ground, held
out for the landscape of my dreams.
IV
It took a while to shake off the tentacles of American life
in the second half of the 20th century. Early into the 21st,
I did, finally. But I left, my dreams intact, my certainty
that beauty was more important than the dross of a
degrading civilization, that an ancient landscape dotted
with ewes and lambs in fields not a quarter mile from a
medieval church was more pleasing to the eye, to the spirit,
to life itself than all the fancy cars, catered feasts, gatherings
of barely civil aunts and uncles and cousins on the entire
east coast of America.
V
It is lonely here sometimes. Not all my aunts, uncles and
cousins were boors. I miss them. But I have a spouse, a dog
and a cat, a few tentative friends—friends being hard-won
even for immigrants who speak the same tongue—in this
old part of England far from cosmopolitan London, or
even Bristol.
VI
It is enough, most times. It is enough to pass that ancient church--
I don't go in, knowing that my deity is not theirs, that my deity is
there always and everywhere, and is not specially there when
those who follow self-serving leaders are told the godhead will
be available and only under certain conditions and only if they
believe the myths about the deity with their whole heart. I pass by,
wondering when the closed pub of the same vintage will
reopen. I hurtle down the roads across fields with the tiny lambs
of early spring, to wind through the woodlands by the river, and
emerge at a beach where dogs are allowed, and there is a
beach café where one can sit over coffee or a snack, sheltered but
outdoors, hearing waves, seeing ships pass through the channel
and into the ocean and the world. It is enough to come home,
however late, and sink into the landscape I yearned for, a
landscape fecund with all good things, and still, as the 21st
century winds on, alive with the constants of life--ewes and
lambs and ancient churches that even Fat Hank the King of Fools,
Oliver Cromwell and Nazi bombs could not demolish.
VII
The sky is blue, the churchyard serene, the woods mysterious,
the sea eternal, my beloveds at my side.
VIII
It is enough.