Kindred
A mansion on a knoll of wiry, scrub grass and thickets on the edge of the dilapidated outskirts of the city. Once a salubrious township in its own right before things turned sour, before the decent, Godfearing residents sold up and followed the money to the bright new suburbs, ritually burying the niggles of repressed fear, desire, anger, distrust, shame, disappointment and anxiety for ‘all the mod cons’. One day when they least expect it these skeletons will exhume themselves and follow their trail. But for now it is dusk, with of course a full moon rising and a mist clinging to the spindly trees, drifting up from marsh. With a nod the widower bids the hand to ring the bell on the wrought iron gate of 1313 Cemetery Lane and a forlorn foghorn bellows from the gloom. A voice slinks over the intercom to brush against his thighs, waist, collar and purr into his ear, Who neatly exhausts the lilies’ pallor with customary patience? His repost is a fossilised egg of an Iguanodon, Nothing and no one but the crackle of discolouration. It is I, your Uncle of Sores, come across the shivering sea smuggling from the old country a Thing with me.
Cave of Hands
Italian missionary and explorer, Alberto Maria de Agostini, goes searching for the whiskers of God in the remote mountains of Patagonia. As if it were a divining rod, he trusts the hollow feeling in his chest, the terrible and beautiful ache of grace that has existed within him since he gave his heart to Christ, back home in Pallone. Stumbling over ice fields as blue as the holy mother’s robe, skirting around sea sounds that sing the sweetest psalms of stoicism and tooth-grinding worship, he follows the shrugged-off, tobacco-spat directions of locals who confessed to having visited Cueva de las Manos as el niño, to spook one another with ghost stories and eerie tales of bargains with chthonic beings. He was the first to officially discover the site in 1941 when the breath clogged in his throat as he held aloft in a trembling fist his oil lamp to view the swirling, spiralling vortex of Early Holocene, hunter-gathering hands sweeping around him, wafting, brushing, weaving, plucking, skinning, casting, sewing, kneading, sharpening, scraping, climbing, praying, clapping, clicking, tapping, flapping up into the darkness of the roof. Executed in natural mineral pigments – iron oxides (red and purple), kaolin (white), natrojarosite (yellow), manganese oxide (black) – ground and mixed with some form of binder, Alberto felt himself drowning as if in a fire-flue or geyser. All he could do to ground himself was cover his gawping fish-gob with his own weathered hand to stop his soul from leaping out and following the spirit dance into the fabric of the rock.
Lacrimosa
“What if the breath that kindled those grim fires, / Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage, / And plunge us in the flames; or from above / Should intermitted vengeance arm again / His red right hand to plague us?”
John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667
The beast that came from the underground places had five fingers that could reach into the hearts of kings and send them blabbering through their palaces in madness, forced as they were to drink from the cup of Gaia’s wrath. There was no escape. And those who joined the protests to call for the protection of the Innocents, to stop the trade of black blood, were cast as full of hate although they had trod the path of gentleness, with their ears full of the terrible song of mass extinction: the wildfires, famines, droughts, boiling seas and plagues of the seven great woes. They wore the number of each calamity, for they had seen what was to come and they wept openly upon the land. Then the Earth’s Redeemers swept through the cities levelling the populations, and the celebrities in their penthouses and closed communities cried out in one voice get me out of here! But there was nowhere to go for the hand could reach into space itself. The false prophets of spin and distraction were rounded up and stricken with such tabloid-splashed tortures so that many sought a swift death, but death eluded them and still they refused to repent. The oil barons and arms dealers, their enablers and appeasers, emerged from their bunkers clad in rags, each bearing their own self-carved yoke, to face the fury of the dispossessed, those thirty million exiles whose homes were charred rubble, lay under water or stretches of burning sand and toxic waste, who had come stepping, slow thighed, along the dust roads, ripping down fences. As the crowd swept upon them like a tidal wave the four angels standing at each quarter blew upon their horns. Their bodies were displayed in the city squares and refused burial until all had viewed their remains. There followed a year of terror where many hid from the glare as moles and termites, where guilt and blame became contagious, suspicions against neighbours led to acts of savagery as the old ways crumbled. It was then that the hand revealed itself as the saviour to all those who had survived the Great Reckoning. Its open palm filled the sky, blotting out the sun, and in a voice like a peal of thunder the people were named as one child with one name who forthwith shalt dwell in peacefulness within the sanctity of its gently rocking cradle.
Bob Beagrie (PhD) lives in Middlesbrough. He has published numerous collections of poetry and several pamphlets, most recently: When We Wake We Think We’re Whalers from Eden (Stairwell Books 2021) And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur (The Black Light Engine Press 2020), Civil Insolencies (Smokestack 2019).
No comments:
Post a Comment