Ecclesiastical Archives • My Dog Errol

363 • Famous Last Words

28th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A monk who had jumped from Ben Nevis
Left his suicide note in a crevice.
Hand-lettered in gold
And five hundred years old
‘Ars longa,’ it claimed, ‘vita brevis’

Illuminated lettering – such as we find in masterpieces such as The Book of Kells – was not normally used for personal communication, but in this instance the author had no choice. An ordinary hand-written message would not have been ‘ars’, so his Latin text would have been irrelevant. Likewise, of course, if the doleful memo had been discovered the following morning, ‘longa’ would not have been apposite. And if he’d simply climbed the mountain, hidden the note, then gone home to the nunnery or wherever he lived, ‘vita brevis’ would have been nonsensical. And the choice of a secure crevice to hide it in, rather than just leaving it to blow about on the mountainside, ensures that it’s not found until ‘longa’ is appropriate. All in all, then, a well-thought out farewell to a no-doubt exemplary life.

362 • Abbesse ! Aidez !

27th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The Abbess’s audit, Your Highness,
Regarding young Thomas Aquinas:
‘In his heart, nonpareil …
In his head, off the scale
But in bed? Sadly, E– – –.’

When the great Georges Perec wrote ‘Abbesse! Aidez!‘ he was perpetrating a sound-pun involving the first four letters of the alphabet as they are pronounced in the Kingdom of Francophonia. Today’s sermon, however, purports to reveal one species of help a real Abbess was able to offer to a Pope, and demonstrates how her early assessment of the levitating-saint-to-be – namely, that his compassion and intellect considerably outweighed any carnal prowess – exactly foretold the characteristics for which ensuing centuries would come to venerate him.

360 • Joy to the world

25th December 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

The truth can no longer be ducked:
This planet’s NOT totally fucked
‘Cos its prime pest, its blight,
Its blind parasite
Is programmed to auto-destruct.

I have to admit I wrote my Christmas Message yesterday — not on the morning of publication as is my wont – and road-tested it on a sandwich board, front and back, walking among last-minute panic-buyers in our Regional Shopping Mall. ‘Why are you wearing a mask?’ a child challenged me. ‘I don’t want to catch the plague,’ said I. ‘Your board says it’s going to disappear of its own accord,’ countered an angry mother. Only then did I realise that ‘pest’, ‘blight’ and so on could perhaps refer to the Covid virus, as well as to the human race. Twice the Christmas Message, then! The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.

355 • Take-away (7)

20th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Look honey, a souvenir-seller:
Go pick up a Pilgrim Umbrella!
Hold it up like a guide
As before me you stride:
In a month I may make Compostella.
NOW BRING ME A SEAFOOD PAELLA.

The same problem arises in every country. The gluttonous tourist, too slothful to maintain a normal walking pace, yearns unashamedly for street food and relies, unabashed, on his beleaguered partner to signpost a spiritual path that he’s too self-indulgent to decipher for himself.

354 • Boa sting

19th December 2020 RL Comments 1 Comment

Said a blustering braggart from Bingley,
‘I can swallow ten scorpions, singly,
Then twelve jalapenos
That burn like volcanoes
And still swear my tonsils aren’t tingly.’

I challenged him, ‘Chew on this pie
Packed with gunpowder, chillies, and lye.’
(And gravy so gingery
Permanent injury
Threatened his throat, by the by).

Then I watched the first slice disappear
And his silly fat face lost its sneer:
As his gums glowed red hot, his
Engorged epiglottis
Put paid to his boasting career.

Of course I concede that the above bulletin is not entirely true, and that it was not penned for publication at My Dog Errol, but rather on the ‘Readers’ Homilies’ page in our Parish Magazine. It illustrates something from the Bible, as I recall. It was rejected by the Vicar (on grounds of length, I can only assume).

352 • You are what you eat

17th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

No cannibal vegan grows fat;
Their ethical stance sees to that.
On a diet of air
You just die of despair.
Take note of this brief caveat.

Food fascism is a pernicious scourge of 21st century life. Social pressure is a bubble only if one can muster the confidence and individuality to burst it; otherwise one is likely to stack fad upon fad in hopes of cultivating peer approval. The vegan cannibal, clearly threatening nobody, ought on paper to be a popular figure; but he or she is sadly opting for a downhill path in terms of bodily prosperity. ‘Take note of this brief caveat’ indeed.

348 • Carnality, spirituality

13th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

You claim that your abs and your pecs
Will dazzle the opposite sex?
I tell you my quads
Have bewildered the Gods
And reduced them to gibbering wrecks.

This is the question for all us body-builders, is it not, whether ’tis nobler to pump up one’s corpse grotesquely in hope that impressionable young women will fancy being steamrollered by one’s unseemly bulk, or whether to treat the said corpse as some kind of overblown temple wherein the majesty of the Divine may be both parodied and repudiated.

341 • Droning

6th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The first time I heard of a drone
I coveted one of my own
To take candid snaps
Of philandering chaps
And make their sins generally known.

This is not the sort of Sunday droning one typically hears from the pulpit, and the frank admission of covetousness comes as a surprise. Yet drones – because they move in a mysterious way – are naturally a source of fascination to 21st-century clergymen, just as steam-railways were to their great-grandfathers. We should not be scandalised by the proposed, puritanical plan – it’s a good deal less invidious than molesting choirboys.

334 • Sole-searching

29th November 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

I hoped to make sense of your views
By walking a mile in your shoes.
But one glimpse of the soles
Scorched by burning hot coals
Means I need no additional clues.

Let us pause, this morning, to think back over the long, dark history of Western culture. It may perhaps be illuminating to try to pinpoint the moment when the ascetic and the self-harmer ceased to be considered uplifting role-models.

327 • My brother’s keeper

22nd November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

“Cain! Where’s thy brother?” “Who, Abel?
I tell you, that kid is unstable.
One day I’m ‘his keeper’
The next, ‘the Grim Reaper’.
I’m not sure I like either label.”

We do not require a Diploma in Psychiatry to identify the truly unstable party in this story, projecting, on to his younger brother, his own mental conflict. Nor do we need reminding that, when the Almighty next asked the same question, Cain had resolved that inner crisis, somewhat messily. Note that Cain did not destroy his other brother, Seth, nor their sisters Luluwa and Delbora. Are these siblings, therefore, all passive accomplices in the First Fratricide, inasmuch as they never exacted revenge on Cain? Or were they simply pipped to the post, when the assassin’s house fell down on his head?

320 • The Apple

15th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Yelled Adam to Cain, ‘Listen lad,
Don’t feed that big snake: he looks bad.’
Whispered Eve, ‘It’s OK:
Take an apple a day
For your real, biological dad.’

‘Every harlot was a virgin once‘, our Great Poet reminds us; in similar spirit this morning’s sermon invites us to reconsider the First Fratricide who, as a blameless tot, feels an instinctive kinship with the serpent that seduced his mother. Adam’s mistrust of the entity that cuckolded him is understandable; yet contradictory parenting ensues, undoubtedly sowing the seeds of Cain’s transgressive development. Wiser heads than mine must ponder how Mary and Joseph sidestepped this problem, when a similar predicament beset their own relationship.

313 • Unholy ghost

8th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I had just been relieved of my post
(No 2 in the Heavenly Host)
When the Infidel Horde
Made me Chair of the Board
(Not bad for an Unholy Ghost?).

It may seem, following today’s developments, that we have the opportunity to lighten up, and turn our thoughts aside from the Orange Demon and his festering cohort. Yet, as Paradise Lost reminds us, the exile may well carve out a new kingdom … he has millions to make as an after-dinner speaker, a freakshow curiosity whose legacy will be measured by the volume of vomit he induces. So, what better way to salute John Milton, who died on this date in 1674, than to flip thru the above-mentioned 80,000-word epic, on which this morning’s rhyme is based? Then, in lieu of stepping out to church, reward your labors with a full English beanfeast.

306 • Regicide

1st November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

With all common sense in abeyance
I summoned MacBeth, at a seance
(The usual procedure
The cards and the ouija)
But no one ‘came through’ (except Fleance).

In Shakespeare’s time the monarch was revered as God’s representative on earth, and to kill him (or her) was a sin without parallel. Today, of course, such potentates as we still acknowledge are more typically reviled as emissars of Satan. In our moments of deepest despair, therefore, we might wish to be possessed by some high-flying assassin, and to accomplish what needs to be accomplished; but in fact all we can muster is the spirit of an obscure runaway, remembered only for fleeing a scene of monstrous injustice – an epitome of cravenness in crisis.

299 • Poets’ Corner

25th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I was charmed, at The Tabard, by Chaucer,
But his pilgrims could not have been coarser.
The Friar and the Dyer
Set fire to the Squire
And the Nun drank her tea from the saucer.

620 years to the day from his death, Geoffrey Chaucer’s band of Canterbury pilgrims still serves as an exemplary model … all types and trades socialising without inhibition, their differences of class and rank rightly set aside. Today’s sermon, however, prompts us to ponder the charmer’s continuing residence in Poets’ Corner, asking if Westminster Abbey is really the best spot for the shrine of a rapist?

298 • Decent folk

24th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note that your godfather, Geir,
Though scarcely a social pariah,
Has a squint and a hump
That make decent folk jump
So we’re slinging him out of the choir.

‘Decent folk’ … what a world of repugnance and shame that nauseating phrase brings up. If we all boycotted ensembles where such a term is used in earnest, choral singing would cease overnight. No bad thing, you might retort. But that end must not be accomplished by marginalising the Geirs and quasi-Geirs in our society … who are legion.

292 • Gnasher

18th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

The last time I met Tarantino
I was screening my ‘short’ at Das Kino
About Dennis the Menace’s
Parthenogenesis
Back in the days of Das Beano.

That ‘short’ was the only motion picture I ever finished (and it had only one screening) but there’s enough on the cutting-room floor to make a couple nice ‘longs’ if I ever get the time. The commemorative poem came along at least fifteen years later, a tardy response to Quentin who – with characteristically brusque erudition – had challenged me to write a metrically-perfect advert for the movie, in this form, in which one line contained but a single word. Of course Shakespeare did it better (‘Never, never, never, never, never’) but that’s too bleak a message for Sunday, when we should all rightly be devoting our meditations to Miraculous Births and their Consequences.

285 • Jordan

11th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

There’s just one more applicant: Gordon,
Well-equipped for the post of church warden.
A total abstainer,
He’s drunk wine in Cana,
And once dipped his nose in the Jordan.

We’re in real danger, here, of seeing a thoroughly unsuitable candidate appointed to a responsible office, thanks to the shortsighted – or perhaps wittingly bogus – recommendations of a silver-tongued sponsor.

271 • Sermon of the Stripes

27th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘I don’t like the look of your back,’
Said one zebra. ‘Get out of our pack.’
‘We’re just different types,’
Said the one with white stripes
To the other, whose stripes were all black.

Would that we lived in a receptive world where the childlike simplicity of an animal parable sufficed not only to turn the hateful tide of racist rhetoric, but also to clarify and bolster the self-worth of the myriad poor souls who endure it. “Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed”, writes our Great Poet. Yet, amid the tumult of modern-day hatred and hurt, upraised voices too often defy comprehension, emitting ‘more heat than light’ as the saying goes. And the cruel crassitude of our amoral leaders – to whom any kind of enlightenment is anathema – constitutes the most tragic obstruction of all.

264 • Snake in the Boudoir

20th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Coition continued full-tilt
Till a cobra crawled out of the quilt;
This dampened the heat
In the Honeymoon Suite
And a quart of Veuve Clicquot got spilt.

Ordinary folk have little to fear from the proverbial ‘snake in the grass’, because the snake in the grass is minding his or her own business, in the same way as a bridal couple does on their wedding night. The non-proverbial ‘snake in the bedding’, however, is another story, and its kinship with the Garden of Eden narrative – from which humanity didn’t emerge particularly well – is not easily overlooked. For those who will wish to reflect on this matter a little, until we meet next Sunday, a suggested topic: ‘This House believes we should all be a lot happier if the cobra remained in the quilt next time: out of sight, out of mind.’

257 • Femme Fatale

13th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Yet rather than cutting my hair
Delilah confided, ‘Beware!
By curtailing the length
I may limit your strength,
And you’ve little of either to spare.’

This morning’s reading from Judges 16 warned us about the guile of Philistine women, and about the likely aftermath of games that involve sexual partners in tying each other up. Our sermon, now, will develop that theme of the femme fatale, and seek to establish which option is – in the long term – more injurious to the male ego: (a) to be castrated outright, or (b) to be spared emasculation thanks to confidential hints that there’s not much down there worth lopping off?

250 • Arms of Mary

6th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

While dancing with Mother Teresa
I noticed she carried a Taser,
Three Colt .45s
And six slaughterman’s knives
(No wonder the other nuns praise her).

Sentimentalists point to tininess and piety to explain the extraordinary career of Sister Mary Teresa (whose Feast Day was yesterday); the above snapshot lays the emphasis on feisty preparedness. In deciding which side to take, be sure to avoid gender bias.

243 • Crim. Con.

30th August 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

I observe that your wife has undressed.
My brief telepathic request
Was never expected
To be intercepted …
I trust you don’t think me a pest.

The priest who spouts Mosaic law forbids us to ‘covet’ another man’s wife; the attorney, blethering about ‘criminal conversation’, concerns himself with ‘physical contact with an alien and unlawful organ’. These pests aside, where does blame lie in the present, sad case? The disrobing spouse, responding to a supernaturally-registered suggestion, perhaps believes she is obeying the will of a Higher Power. Can the true issuer of that command really be guilty, if he never expected his libidinous impulses to come to light? Many would consider him no adulterer; but more would consider him a fool, since – by apologising so stiffly to the no-doubt startled husband – he proclaims his otherwise-unprovable involvement. Yet, to the woman, the putative adulterer is a hero, having rescued her from possible charges of wilful exhibitionism, or lewd and wanton provocation. Bravo for him, therefore; and huzzah for such a tiny bulletin, fairly bursting with such sapient doctrine.

236 • Virgo

23rd August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

You may trust, under Virgo the Virgin,
That your boons and your blessings will burgeon:
But such hopes are misplaced
(Like a frog in fishpaste
Or a goat in the garb of a surgeon).

My mother had a fair-sized bee in her bonnet when it came to Mariolatry. Sooner trust an astrologer than a woman, she would often say. For a long while I was blind to the paradox in those words, but recent events in my private life, which I shall not make public here, are forcing me to re-evaluate them.

229 • Pura tontería, pura sabiduría

16th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The night we gunned down an intruder
He proved to be Pablo Neruda.
Here’s hoping the burglar
We’ve hanged in the pergola
Wasn’t The Lion of Judah.

Constitutionally one is permitted to defend one’s patch, but too often this right is taken by householders as a license to exterminate any foreign or outlandish figure who approaches or penetrates our homesteads. In this morning’s sermon we remember all the great minds and shining role-models, the poets and Aslan-substitutes, who have been swept away in such episodes of indiscriminate violence.

222 • Apecraft

9th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As I read in The Military Journal,
An ape’s reached the rank of full colonel.
Since beasts lack a soul
He can act out the rôle
Without fearing Hellfire eternal.

We’ve grown accustomed to press scaremongering concerning military robots, which pictures Artificial Intelligence running berserk on battlefields of the future. Far more alarming, however, are reports that our Masters of War have already appointed creatures – without conscience, yet close to us in tactical reasoning – to execute their damnable machinations. Has humanity learnt nothing at all from the PG Tips scandal of the 1970s?

216 • Carruthers

3rd August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I was baiting a bear named Carruthers
At a church of the Carmelite Brothers.
I’m ferociously strong
So he didn’t last long,
But I guess they have plenty of others.

Musculature and morale falter infallibly in captive animals: it’s not the strength of the vainglorious aggressor we marvel at here, but the weakness of his victim. Monks may be ‘known for their unpleasant habits’, as the old joke goes: but should we perhaps applaud this compassionate Brotherhood for allowing its bears to be slain outright? Worldlier bear-baiting gangs are obliged, by commercial imperative, to keep their victims alive, to suffer – for our delight – day after day.

215 • Oyster Farewell

2nd August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Farewell to my oyster, Odette,
Who could never abide getting wet
But would snivel and cry
When the bed was too dry:
All in all, quite a difficult pet.

This Sunday’s moral dilemma. Which is more odious: to posit an inner life for a creature that self-evidently cannot signal emotion to a human being? Or to denigrate her supposed caprices, when these have clearly been triggered by needlessly-inflicted cruelty?

208 • Body and/or Soul

26th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

There are Driverless Cars in our town.
Small wonder pedestrians frown:
One went for a jog
With her Bodiless Dog
And a Riderless Bike knocked it down.

Just as Modern Man has dispensed with the idea of the soul, so his cleverest machines now rove at large without their once-crucial guiding hands. Emblematically, in this Sunday’s searching parable, we witness the extinguishing of a Spirit Companion (easily the best kind of dog, in that it does not slobber, yell, bite, excrete or fornicate indiscriminately) by exactly such a futile, mechanical zombie.

201 • Unhappy houri

19th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The great Russian cosmonaut, Yuri,
Was fired into space with a houri.
But when they came down
His face wore a frown
And hers wore a mask of cold fury.

Though the literal truth of this fragment is debatable, it is a parable fit to illustrate any sermon about the moral and ethical implications of sex in space. (The Kremlin evidently didn’t expect the Creator to take pity on the lonely Gagarin, and fashion a companion for him by repurposing a redundant rib).

194 • Ms Carter, recollected

12th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Senior teacher, Ms Carter?
That course was a total non-starter.
I blame her huge eyes,
Her marble-white thighs
And her stylishly-streaming stigmata.

Yes, Paulina Carter, never to be forgotten, however hard I try. It was my first glimpse of such oozing wounds, and her whispered explanation (‘Call me a victim soul’) seemed somehow unsettling. Many of my classmates learned to focus on their studies: I only had eyes for Paulina.

189 • Dr Campbell recollected

7th July 2020 RL Comments 12 Comments

Our Deputy Dean, Dr Campbell
Told us ‘God’s out to get those who gamble’.
Yet she died, in a bet,
Playing Russian Roulette
Which the School needed skill to unscramble.

This somewhat garish episode from childhood taught us more about adult hypocrisy than we could have learnt from any number of bookish fables or homilies. The school Governors reacted to a popular employee’s death by proclaiming a string of revisionist accusations … how she had ‘lied to the Board who appointed her’ … how her college degree had been ‘incorrectly specified’ … how dates of her previous employment ‘contained inaccuracies’. In short, parents could not blame the school for appointing such a dissolute daredevil to be their children’s moral guardian, because ‘Donna Campbell was not the person she purported to be.’ Well, which of us is? Even as a child I was mesmerised by the Establishment’s feeble catalogue of squirming, pedantic and ineffectual exculpations. Hats off, say I, to a memorable teacher, whose gift for non-verbal demonstration imparted such significant life-lessons.

187 • Ms Clayton recollected

5th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Junior teacher, Ms Clayton,
Disparaged the books of Len Deighton:
‘Too dismal, too bloody!
Instead let us study
My Odes to the Glory of Satan.’

‘Clayface’, as she was always known, had little idea what teenage boys enjoy reading – nor, indeed, what Bible-belt parents consider appropriate. I think she was from The Bronx, or Brooklyn. At that age, I imagined they were the same place.

180 • Ms Purvis recollected

28th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Primary teacher, Ms Purvis,
Enlivened a boring church service
By lighting a fuse
That ran under the pews,
And made some of the parents quite nervous.

Ms Purvis was another amiable maverick on our school staff, and this had been one of her more famous Founder’s Day pranks. Of course we urged her to repeat the escapade, but I guess she’d gotten a major rap before, so it had to remain a story.

178 • Ms Nicholls recollected

26th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

When our Primary teacher, Ms Nicholls
Equipped us with scythes and with sickles
We skipped down the street
Swiping folk off their feet.
She did get us into such pickles!

In a lesson about the Grim Reaper, when I was probably about 7 years old, our teacher brought in her academical robe and some gardening tools, and we took turns to dress up as Death. I owe that school a lot, and return to it often in dreaming. Ms Nicholls seems to have moved on, however.

166 • Deep Fake

14th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

That evening with Truman Capote
He praised the great power of peyote.
I think it was him,
Though he looked pretty grim,
Part capon and partly coyote.

Ingestion of psychoactive substances is a significant component in many a religious ritual, and our species surely benefits from experiencing, or seeming to experience, the world from the viewpoint of non-human, ‘totemic’ animals. In the present bulletin, however, it’s unclear whether the author, or the writer he alludes to, is under the drug’s influence.

159 • Prohibited degree

7th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

“On Saturday night, for my sins,
The sex-robot gave birth to twins:
Yeah, sounds kinda sweet
But the brats are on heat –
And that’s where my problem begins.”

The vicar made no apology for basing his sermon on a rhyme copied from a lavatory door. As the future promises ever-more realistic robots, he asserted, the poem’s scenario will become commonplace, posing ‘hitherto unexampled moral dilemmas’ for mankind. He seemed more interested in delineating ‘transgressive urges’ than in recommending how we should handle them.

152 • Sapient cephalopod

31st May 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

The octopus looked in my eye
As he clung to my shivering thigh.
‘Man is scarcely unique,
Just a hideous freak,’
He observed. I could make no reply.

Alarmingly the octopus sets out to debunk Descartes‘s teaching, that ‘animals are mere machines, but man stands alone’, but its intentions are contradicted by the scenario itself. For one thing, the man is not ‘standing alone’. For another, only a unique species could fantasise such a damning put-down from a ‘mere machine’ – and then be too stupid to come up with an appropriate riposte.

145 • Excuses

24th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As I lifted the side of the lorry
Twelve pigs tumbled into the quarry.
Thus the law they call ‘Sod’s’
Caused an outcome at odds
With the one I’d been hoping for. Sorry.

An apology ought generally to be accepted in good faith, but perhaps not when the speaker seeks to blame some external ‘law’ for his or her personal blunder. The Bible speaks of demonic possession in falling swine, of course: this might have made for a more winning excuse, though that story’s Animal Rights credentials are pretty flimsy too.

141 • Meet the team (8)

20th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Your trainer’s Monsignor Arturo,
The curse of the Currency Bureau.
His fraudulent dealing
Has gone through the ceiling
And trebled the price of the Euro.

Reformed drug-users make the best addiction counsellors, just as burglars, having served time in jail, often prosper as security consultants. We might surmise from his title that Arturo, above, is a former inmate of the Vatican, and perhaps feel heartened that his skills – if such they be – have latterly found favour in a commercial milieu.

138 • Mount Ararat

17th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In the season that followed the flood
When the world was in bloom, or in bud,
Mrs Noah complained
‘Since this planet got drained
My husband’s been stuck in the mud.’

All too often the wife feels sidelined during the enaction of a Manly Project, and finds it difficult to empathise with the exhaustion and ennui experienced by the husband when it’s over. The more so, when every other creature within eye- and ear-shot has gone forth to multiply with a vengeance.

131 • Skunk

10th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

One evening (a tiny bit drunk)
My room-mate befriended a skunk.
When I voiced my regret
He said ‘Don’t be upset,
She’ll be safe on the uppermost bunk.’

Preachers urge us to find the best in our fellows, and not jump to the lazy conclusion that ‘there’s no smoke without fire’. Yet it’s hard to believe, in the present instance, that the room-mate’s intentions are, in the long term, Platonic. ‘O perilous fire that in the bed-straw bredeth’, as our great poet observed.

124 • Missouri position

3rd May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Though His sea-walking record still stands
Christ’s rivals haunt various lands:
The Bishop of Newry
Has crossed the Missouri
Not once, but three times … on his hands.

Of course there are those who regard the original miracle as a piece of trickery, one that crossed the shaman/showman boundary. It’s nonetheless dispiriting to read of high officials in the Church – however skilled in circus-craft – setting out to upstage the Nazarene in so meretricious a fashion.

117 • Rhine recovery

26th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I was casting my pearls before swine
When the fattest one fell in the Rhine.
Two nuns in Cologne
Fished it out with a drone,
But more by good luck than design.

Like many a parable, this poem probably answers more questions than it asks. In terms of title I toyed with ‘The Pearl Fishers’ and ‘The Pig Fishers’ but decided that either would be thoroughly misleading. In any event, the point is proven: one man’s miracle is another man’s coincidence.

110 • Niger

19th April 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Adrift on the old river Niger,
Just me and the prophet Elijah
And a Woman in White
Who likes watching men fight –
So we take it in turns to oblige her.

Some ‘Sunday fools’ still believe spirits move among us, and a few, perhaps, suppose that they’re prepared to conspire with mortals in illogical, Lawrentian pacts. But what we’re really investigating here is the troubling, antiquated trope of Objectified Woman as Muse. Perhaps she is a spirit too?

103 • Orinoco communion

12th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

We scattered your ashes, dear Yoko,
On the tides of the great Orinoco.
Then we stood on the bank
Where we mournfully drank
One very small cup of cold cocoa.

Strangely our culture dignifies rivers with names, and admiring soubriquets such as ‘great’. But here that adjective serves to minimise the status of the departed, as does the meagre potation, shared among an unspecified number of mourners.

096 • Substitution

5th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note: our great brain surgeon, Guy,
Has sadly been Summoned On High.
His place will be filled
By this gibbon: unskilled,
Yet keen to be given a try.

Euphemism is the rhetoric of cowards: if a priest cannot mention death from the pulpit, where can we expect to hear it named? Covid 19 takes the high-flying medic as readily as the homeless man; but in the former’s case, as this vicar reminds us, there is no shortage of volunteers willing to step into the breach.

089 • Saint Lawrence

29th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

On his water-skis, down the St Lawrence,
Hurtled John, the Archbishop of Florence;
First his wires became crossed,
Then his halo got lost.
Soon he gave himself up to the torrents.

Factually this new river-piece may seem problematic, fraught as it is with lies and nonsense. Symbolically, however, we find The Baptist succumbing to the immersion on which his fame rested, and note in passing how the foolhardy loss of any churchman’s reputation (cf the halo, above) habitually presages self-extinction.

082 • Saviours

22nd March 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Did you read, on some scrap of papyrus,
How Christ raised the daughter of Jairus?
No dark Dead Sea Scrolls
But soft white paper rolls
For our conquest of Coronavirus.

Admittedly there were no New Testament books among the genuine Dead Sea Scrolls, though with the more recently-discovered fakes anything goes. But whereas those scrolls record the superstitious beliefs of a sect 22 centuries ago, 2020’s rational response to mortal disease is spelt out in the barren superflux of hoarded lavatory-paper.

068 • Bishop Berkeley

8th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I never supposed Bishop Berkeley
Would seem, as a spectre, so sparkly.
It’s frankly nightmarish
To see him so garish
Especially through a glass, darkly.

Berkeley argued that what we see exists only in the mind. If this is indeed a spectre, it would seem to be offering some kind of ironic comment on that theory. More probably, however, our narrator has been the victim of brainwashing by pious parents or Bible-bashing teachers in high-school.

061 • Delinquents

1st March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A posse of querulous crones
Went out in the dark to throw stones.
One struck a black cloud
Which split, like a shroud
As the angels glared down from their thrones

Our scenario here may seem improbable, but of course the demonisation of the Energetic Older Woman is not. No surprise, then, that the angels glared.

054 • Mysterious ways

23rd February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Arrested for doing a wheelie
Inside the cathedral at Ely,
The bishop begins
To atone for his sins
By singing all hymns in Swahili.

Is anyone even faintly shocked, nowadays, by news stories of this kind? Ecclesiastical malpractice is typically shrugged aside, while punishment and penitence are too often tokenistic.

047 • Entrapment

16th February 2020 RL Comments 6 Comments

When summoned to meet the new vicar,
I took him two bottles of liquor:
With a villainous oath
He decanted them both
Saying ‘Bet I can swallow mine quicker.’

We may well ponder the nature of this ‘summons’; less obscure is the motive of the summonee, who exploits the churchman’s weakness by taking the role of tempter. Which, then, is the more culpable party?

040 • Brecon

9th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Said the priest in the parish of Brecon,
‘This God thing is finished, I reckon.
I’ll hang up my cassock
And crouch on this hassock
Till fresh opportunities beckon.’

Disillusion is the mother of liberation, it’s often said. But it’s all too easy to ‘crouch’, in passive expectancy, amid the ruins of an outmoded belief system, rather than seeking out – or forging – a fresh one.