Palms Down
PREAMBLE :-
Suddenly, a hand touched me, which made me tremble on my knees and on the palms of my hands. Daniel 10:10
I was watching ‘84 Charring Cross Road’ a great story about literature and the more important relationships of love and care that can be built around books, around words. I really like that movie, tinged with the cheeky humor of Brooks and played out by the type writer antics of Bancroft his wife. How did she and even he and this script ever get together? I am glad they did.I think it was all those table laid out leather bound books in the antiquarian bookshop that took me back to 1980 in Matlock Bath Derbyshire, where as a Bible College student, along with others, I was invited into an old hall where a now dead Pastors library, having been donated to the college, was laid out on the table, and where the bowels of his former love lay strewn along the Formica tops like an autopsy performed by a mad man, or a clown on drugs. Even so, I was hungry for his dead entrails. I still am. But I find myself increasingly alone in that hunger.
PERFORMANCE TIPS:
This piece covers a range of subjects from the love of Theological books, the worship of God, the suffering of the Pastors wife, wrong priorities in ministry maybe and maybe the greater priorities if ministry and worship as well. It is to be said with some pathos and some regret, and providing the question of, “AND THAT’S SIFFICIENT!?” is said with some subtle condemnation, then I think you will have got the emotional mix correct. Remember, that question should be really emphatic? Questionably emphatic! Now there’s a thought.
----------O----------
I remember the damp white plastered gold and gilded room
And the book packed bow legged trestled tables overlaid with words.
The lions and tigers of the faculty had
Already sliced off the sirloins of their own selection and now we
The poor Hyenas of Hermeneutics, were left to
Crawl over the carcass
I felt like a cockroach on the corpse of a fallen soldier
An unknown comrade
Unbuttoning his battle tunic top and reaching into the inside
Holy pockets and pulling out pictures of his beloved children and
His wife all covered on blood.
Yes, I remember.
All the books were covered in blood.
“You can have as a many as you want.
Just make a donation for his widow”
All that tea, I thought,
All that tea and Jaffa cakes
Served faithfully from a rose patterned black enameled tin tray
To other black-shoed and tight-lipped ministers of religion and
Women sniffling up the tears among his books, where for years
His widow, his help meet, his poor confidant and
Washer of his feet
His camel kneed prayer partner
His widow
Left in grey and
Waiting loneliness, and
Like his books
All neatly laid out by the
Bible College Fishmongers
Was also left abandoned
I can still smell those full and filleted pages, even today and
As my own time now races on and
Thinking
I will probably pip her at the post
I muse about his sad and sallow-cheeked widow
I figured that she did not miss his children.
Neither will mine.
For she had, over the years, been jealous of the attention
He had heaped upon them. After all,
He had touched them more than her and
Tenderly so,
So tenderly.
I noted that, unlike me
He never left a mark on his kids
But occasionally I would find an old note
Pressed between the leaves
An address, a receipt for four shillings and sixpence
Some sermon points in blue ink
Spent cartridges of shots long since fired
After thirty years and more than thirty addresses
I have given away many of my own children now for they
Were too expensive to take with me, and
In the cold recession, this greater depression of today
My own library has shrunk and so
Like the so called liberated
Across my nation, the fertility rate of
The blood stained page has also
Diminished
In ignorance
We die
We die
In ignorance
Thus, I have little meat to leave and
Fewer still are the Hyenas of Hermeneutic who
Would want to pick over them, for they have grown much wiser
Standing mostly now on two legs, bathing in some
Flat palmed closed eyed and gently rocking
Solitary celestial presence
Swaying to the branded bongos of a benefice beauty
AND THAT’S SUFFICIENT!?
I’ve never got it myself
For it looks to me like
The Selfish pleasuring of the soul
Whereas, when on my knees
Over a cup of tea even
My heavily tattooed children always eventually brought me and,
It seemed
All the other open eyed bent kneed worshippers
To the strange comfort of Holy ground
Where we would often find ourselves before Him
Palms down
Crawling
On All fours
Though my widow shall be poor
My greater concern
God help me
Is that my kids won’t be taken into care
Not even for a small donation
For all the men of that trade
The Blacksmiths and
The Fishmongers
The Verbal Undertakers and all
The lovers of bloodstained paper
Have vanished
----------O----------
I remember the damp white plastered gold and gilded room
And the book packed bow legged trestled tables overlaid with words.
The lions and tigers of the faculty had
Already sliced off the sirloins of their own selection and now we
The poor Hyenas of Hermeneutics, were left to
Crawl over the carcass
I felt like a cockroach on the corpse of a fallen soldier
An unknown comrade
Unbuttoning his battle tunic top and reaching into the inside
Holy pockets and pulling out pictures of his beloved children and
His wife all covered on blood.
Yes, I remember.
All the books were covered in blood.
“You can have as a many as you want.
Just make a donation for his widow”
All that tea, I thought,
All that tea and Jaffa cakes
Served faithfully from a rose patterned black enameled tin tray
To other black-shoed and tight-lipped ministers of religion and
Women sniffling up the tears among his books, where for years
His widow, his help meet, his poor confidant and
Washer of his feet
His camel kneed prayer partner
His widow
Left in grey and
Waiting loneliness, and
Like his books
All neatly laid out by the
Bible College Fishmongers
Was also left abandoned
I can still smell those full and filleted pages, even today and
As my own time now races on and
Thinking
I will probably pip her at the post
I muse about his sad and sallow-cheeked widow
I figured that she did not miss his children.
Neither will mine.
For she had, over the years, been jealous of the attention
He had heaped upon them. After all,
He had touched them more than her and
Tenderly so,
So tenderly.
I noted that, unlike me
He never left a mark on his kids
But occasionally I would find an old note
Pressed between the leaves
An address, a receipt for four shillings and sixpence
Some sermon points in blue ink
Spent cartridges of shots long since fired
After thirty years and more than thirty addresses
I have given away many of my own children now for they
Were too expensive to take with me, and
In the cold recession, this greater depression of today
My own library has shrunk and so
Like the so called liberated
Across my nation, the fertility rate of
The blood stained page has also
Diminished
In ignorance
We die
We die
In ignorance
Thus, I have little meat to leave and
Fewer still are the Hyenas of Hermeneutic who
Would want to pick over them, for they have grown much wiser
Standing mostly now on two legs, bathing in some
Flat palmed closed eyed and gently rocking
Solitary celestial presence
Swaying to the branded bongos of a benefice beauty
AND THAT’S SUFFICIENT!?
I’ve never got it myself
For it looks to me like
The Selfish pleasuring of the soul
Whereas, when on my knees
Over a cup of tea even
My heavily tattooed children always eventually brought me and,
It seemed
All the other open eyed bent kneed worshippers
To the strange comfort of Holy ground
Where we would often find ourselves before Him
Palms down
Crawling
On All fours
Though my widow shall be poor
My greater concern
God help me
Is that my kids won’t be taken into care
Not even for a small donation
For all the men of that trade
The Blacksmiths and
The Fishmongers
The Verbal Undertakers and all
The lovers of bloodstained paper
Have vanished
----------O----------
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