COVID MASS

(Commissioned by the JAM on the Marsh music festival in 2020 to accompany a performance of Faure's Requiem in St Leonard's Church, Hythe, Kent, to commemorate the losses of the Covid pandemic)

These stones were set by what you cannot see:
by faith and fear,
abstractions now that move no masonry.
Only music now can fill this space,
belief’s long-widowed bride,
the slowly-fading shade of certainty.
In the hard acoustic of agnosticism,
we attune to the eternal’s elegy,
epiphenomenon, not epiphany,
attentive still, though in absentia,
as God may be.

*

After the play, the ghost light on the stage.
The scent of faith’s pressed flower on the page.

A sun-bleached poster for a vanished show. The yellow grass after the travellers go.

The forest shower when the rain moves on.
The signs still point the way. The place is gone.

But in the night that has no mariner’s mark, a dead star’s light is better than the dark.

*

They tell you it gets easier with time.
The tired trick of teleology
still promises completeness up ahead,
as though you somehow learn the more of life
the closer that it brings you to the dead.
But this is a pilgrimage to poverty,
life leaves you one day poorer every night
and further off from wisdom every day,
and all you learn is that no answers come,
though that might count as wisdom, in a way.
This is the end of searching, when you know
that revelation has no rendezvous
and, standing in God’s presence as they do,
before the only answer they should need,
even the angels have their questions too.

*

In the end it is the flesh that fails, not you.
Though pain may try to tell you otherwise.
You could have loved more - true.
So could we all.
But you loved as much as you are suffering now.
The books will balance finely:
loss for love,
remorse for your omissions.
You have paid.

*

What a letting go this Lent has been.
The appetite is not deferred but dead;
the knife not sharpened to a sheen
but snapped instead.
I am glad of it.

To know I am not needed
is a fugitive's amnesty,
and it feels a lot like absolution
to accept absurdity.
Never to be missed
and not to mind
is a mirror shattered
that always showed too much
and was not kind. I do not know if this is wrong.
I know it to be true.
I might have called it failure;
it could be freedom too.

*

There will be a time for them:
a Sunday, perhaps.
No tasks.
No visitors.
No calls to make.
It will be neither summer nor autumn,
winter nor spring.

And there will be all the time,
all the time in the world,
to go to them again,
those places that you left unwillingly,
vowing you would return,
time to meet again the ones you loved,
and missed the moment that their story closed.

So many years you want to live again.
So many things that time has put away.
There will be time for them one Sabbath day.

*

This emptiness has no reproach for you.
What you withheld does not diminish it;
it grows no greater because of what you gave.
The terms it gives are unconditional.
For mercy, any measure is enough,
So set your shortcomings as surety,
and failure as fulfilment
and make the one transaction of
your trust:
the debt of living is redeemed with dust.