A Prayer to an Unknown God

 Dear Lord and Father of Mankind....

Reapers, Grim

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,

Forgive my foolish ways!

Reclothe me in my rightful mind,

In purer lives Thy service find,

In deeper reverence, praise.

In deeper reverence, praise.

Swan, Mute

We used to sing this hymn lustily at school.  We sang it in 1966, in a three ton truck jolting up the hills from Warcop, after the World Cup Final (a mere twenty-one years after the end of the war).  We sang it at my father's memorial service.  Although I never knew it was about intoxication, it is certainly one of my favourite songs.

But, I digress.  Dear Lord, I want to confess....

I pray you will listen, discreetly of course, whoever, and wherever you may be.  You must be busy.  I will be brief.

Goose, Greylag

I am a good-for-nothing.  I am unkind.  I am thoughtless.  I am self-centred - I have lived a life of self-indulgence and laziness.  I have never made the extra effort to offer anything to others.

I know that's not unusual, but I want to get it off my chest.  I need to tell you that I am not excited that the England football team have just beaten those poor young Croatians.  And I will be even less content if Southgate's boys get through the next round.... leave alone how upset I will be if they win the final.  Not that I am anti-football.  I do enjoy a good game, and played with great enjoyment in times well past..... I just hate the way this now plays into the jingoism and gloating insularity of the mob, which, I regret to say, currently includes the prime minister and his servile cabinet.  To my mind, this brutish nationalism is a form of racism, a thuggish celebration of completely misunderstood historical accidents.  Scratch any Englishman or woman and just under the surface there will be some trace of immigrant.

Avocet v Egret

No, Lord, forgive me, but I don't like these modern 'conservatives'.  I didn't vote for them, and never will.  I didn't vote for Brexit, either - though of course I see now how wrong I was in opposing it.  The facts, of course, speak for themselves, and how I could have erred in arrogance I no longer understand.

Egret v Avocet

Of course I sympathise with the fishermen, the sheep farmers, the publicans, restauranteurs and hoteliers, but they are just remoaners set in their blinkered opinions, happy enough when they can exploit others, but up in arms when they can't make a living.  Can they not see that 'Sovereignty' is the thing?

Avocet and Egret

 

And the desirability of sovereignty, Lord, is quite unrelated, as you will know, to any kind of inequality, dominance, exploitation, or even slavery.  [Just ask the Jesuits!]

I mean I have employed people.  I will confess I have paid people to clean our house, though in my misunderstanding I truly supposed they wished to work for me and to be paid.....  But that is another story.....  I digress.  Again.

Fowl!

Drop Thy still dews of quietness,

Till all my strivings cease;

Take from my soul the strain and stress,

And let my ordered life confess

The beauty of Thy peace.

No, Lord, I just have to confess that I don't like everybody [pace, Hilly, this doesn't mean I dislike everybody... it means I do not necessarily like every single person, but I do like some people!], and I am deliberately mean to people, even, sometimes, to my own sick wife.  I would ask you to forgive me, but what right have you to undo my sin?  Who are you anyway?  I went to your house yesterday, and you weren't there.....

I even went to St Botolph's at Trunch, where there is one of only four font canopies in England (the others, in case you have forgotten, are at St Mary's, Luton; Durham Cathedral; and St Peter Mancroft's, Norwich) - but you weren't there!

And today, I went to the Church of St Mary, Syderstone, this afternoon, and you wouldn't even let me in!

And then, to add insult to injury, I get home and find a note from the local vicar telling me she recently bought a small plant and found a pretty pot to put it in.... And, guess what, it flowered!  And this is a metaphor.  As she explains, the word gospel was originally used by the Roman military to proclaim 'The rightful ruler has come' ..... So she concludes, My plant thrives as I give it care in the right environment, and we, likewise, thrive when we have the rightful ruler......

Right on, Caligula!

Lord, give me strength!

Swans pretending to be ostriches to avoid the good news

Sorry, Lord, I know I go on a bit.  

But, as I was saying, I am not a good egg.  I think bad things, like, perhaps this Covid thing is like you flooding the world when Noah was around?  I mean, maybe there are too many of us?

Back to the Byrds/Birds.....

Tern

Tern

Tern

No indeed, you are right.  To everything there is a season.....

I'll give you a metaphor now.  I was at the Norfolk Wildlife Trust Reserve at Hickling Broad,  and a very nice man on reception told me that an American Plover had been spotted at a certain point if I wanted to try and see it.  He said 'Ploh - ver,' where I would have thought 'Pluvver' was more normal, but leave that for the moment. 

So I meander round to the viewpoint, and find an army of twitchers, some in full military gear, armed to the teeth with huge cameras and telescopes....

All staring out across the pond at something I couldn't quite determine.

So I took this picture:

Which, as everyone will know, is not an American Plover.  It is, in fact, a Black-winged Stilt, whose name in Czech, for football fans, is pisila cáponohá (and in Danish it is Stylteløber).  {The Italians, never shy of a touch of class, call it Cavaliere d'Italia.}

Now here's the thing.  Were the mass of ardent ornithologists gazing at an American Plover, which I couldn't see, while not seeing this pretty rare visitor?  Or, were we all looking at the same bird, while the gentleman at the gate had seen something else?  

(Yes, OK, so that's not a metaphor..... But it's a damn fine conundrum!)

But it has got long legs.....  (and there is currently - 05/07/2021 - a Pacific Golden Plover at Cley Marshes....  perhaps the same individual I missed at Hickling?  Ho, Hum....)

Anyway, Lord, if you're there.  I just want to tell you I don't know what I'm doing.  And I would appreciate some help, but the thing is, I don't believe in you.  My wife used to believe very much in you, or so she claimed.  But then she got ill, and prayed and didn't get better. I couldn't see how you could be a good Lord, and Father of Mankind as well, and let her, of all people, get sick in such a devastating way.  

Were you punishing me?  Because, if so, why make her suffer?

Breathe through the heats of our desire

Thy coolness and Thy balm;

Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;

Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,

O still, small voice of calm.

O still, small voice of calm.

Adapted by Garrett Horder from The Brewing of Soma by John Greenleaf Whittier, 1872

Tune 'Repton' 

Hubert Parry, 1888

They are coming.
The reapers are coming.....

The Turning World

Poetry walks

Sheep may safely graze on pasture
When the shepherd guards them well.
Where rulers govern well
we may feel peace and rest
and what makes countries happy

The Turning World is the title of an anthology of poems complied by D J Brinley in 1968 when he found, as a young teacher, that there was a total lack of suitable textbooks to interest teenagers in poetry.

At my school, poetry was delivered and consumed in a variety of ways.  At an early stage we were made to memorise The Brook,  in Nigel Molesworth fashion (Peotry is sissy stuff that rhymes.) 

i come from haunts of coot and hern

i make a sudden sally

and-er-hem-er-hem-the fern

to bicker down a valley….

Down with Skool!  

Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle

Though in How to be Topp, Molesworth offers some conciliation to English teachers….

However there are other poems which creep in from time to time there is one which go

Har fleag har fleag har fleag onward

Into the er rode the 600

            There are as well lars porsena of clusium elegy in country churchyard loss of the royal george and chevy chase.  Anything to do with daffodils is also grate favourite of English masters…..

As pupils we were issued with Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and I still have my copy – it is in remarkably good condition; rarely used, I think a bookseller might say.

So it was that when I became an English teacher myself, the compilation by Mr Brinley was most welcome (pace Palgrave – I do actually treasure it).  I doubt whether I influenced many young minds, but perhaps some of my pupils found words and rhythms in these pages to amuse or console.  I learned that at times the clarity of D H Lawrence worked well:

Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon

Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water

sounds still unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.

Mountain Lion

Thomas Hardy’s Christmas: 1924 gave us something to contemplate:

‘Peace upon earth!’ was said.  We sing it,

And pay a million priests to bring it.

After two thousand years of mass

We’ve got as far as poison-gas.

At the going down of the sun...

And T.S.Eliot’s Preludes always led to sparks of creativity:

The winter evening settles down

With smells of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days….

Red Kite hunting

I did not know it then, but it was Eliot, rehearsing the word burnt, that gave my text-book its name.  In Burnt Norton, the first of  his Four Quartets, written in 1935, he wrote:

At the still point of the turning world.  Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement…..

Kestrel hunting

One time the world hangs still is the depth of winter, the short days of Christmas in the north, when time seems to stall, and days hardly get off the ground.  There is a sense, just after Christmas, that things have come to a halt; the excesses of the celebrations merge with the darkness and the world seems stuck.  Then, almost suddenly, into the New Year, and days seem to lengthen, the birds seem to sing; the air is more alive…..  Eliot’s theme of air blends with the wood smoke of Burnt Norton’s winter fires, and the dance begins again…..

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always –

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

Peotry (sic) perhaps has had its day – the young, no longer in one another’s arms (though very much online), may not have the time to decipher the codes of learned bards, but the art of composing words into shapes and lines is not yet dead.

There is a green hill....

Wordsworth gave good advice, in Up! Up! My Friend!

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:-

We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

O still, small voice of calm

So we walk in the turning world, watching birds making the most of air. Winter has not yet done its worst, perhaps, and fortune smiles for a day or two.  While earnest poets compete this weekend for the Poetry Book Society T S Eliot Prize, this year, the fiftieth anniversary of Eliot’s death, amounting to £20,000 for the winner and £1,500 for each of the ten short-listed competitors, we look for poetry in the landscape and wildlife around us.  

Though it is 98 years since the death of Edward Thomas, his words are still alive:

But these things also are Spring’s –

On banks by the roadside the grass

Long-dead that is greyer now

Than all the Winter it was….

While the North blows, and starling flocks

By chattering on and on

Keep their spirits up in the mist,

And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone.

But These Things Also

The countryside is full of life, and death.  I watch the birds of prey as they scan the fields for voles, unsuspecting lives to take.  

Kestrel hovering

I watch the blackbird as he cleans his beak from wormy residues.  

We scatter flocks of starlings, 

goldfinches, 

fieldfare.  

Larks rise up in alarm, twitter and flit, then fall again to earth.  

Skylark

Pigeons strip the new shoots from the crops; 

Woodpigeon en masse

crows grasp and stab all things they can.  

In the air, flights criss and cross, from late late dawn to early dusk.  The greatest gift, perhaps, is that life goes on.

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die.

Burnt Norton

Just as we turned for home, I caught a sequence of aerial combat that could have shown real feathers flying, but which, as if to show us how, ended in peace.

Buzzard to Base, tumbleweed, OK?

Bandit on tail

Check six

Locking on, BFM

Dive dive dive

Holding hands?

OK Kestrel, RTB

B-LOC, Bingo

A final image from these walks is these two lovebirds.  Spring is in the air! And poetry is love.....

Jack and Jill Daw

And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time

Burnt Norton

T S Eliot

However, the final final last word must be Nigel Molesworth's, as he reads to the class from The Burial Sir of Sir John Moore Sir at Corunna Sir (A titter from 2B they are wet and i will tuough them up after.)

Notadrumwasheardnotafuneralnote

shut up peason larffing

As his corse

As his corse

what is a corse sir? gosh is it

to the rampart we carried

(whisper you did not kno your voice was so lovely)

Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot.

PING!

Shut up peason i know sir he's blowing peas at me

Oer the grave where our hero was buried.

(A pause a grave bow i retire and Egad! peason hav placed a dainty pin upon mine seat. Fie!)