When they pinned him
to that tree –
Him, I mean.
Once and for all –
them, you, me –
He nailed it.
 
© Kevin Scully, 2018

September 14 is the Feast of the Holy Cross

The space and silence of monasteries have held a special place for many people, not just practising Christians. I remember one character who propped up a bar with me in north London who used to go a Benedictine foundation once a year to relax, read and dry out. He was a prodigious drinker and would opine that the combination of de-stressing, catching up with a wide range of writing and being off the booze probably extended his life.
 
I suppose I could draw on a similar threefold blessing. I first entered the cloisters of Wantage as I came to the end of my training at theological college in Oxford. I have gone on retreat there, among other places, ever since. Part of my withdrawal from parochial life allowed me to pray and reflect on aspects of life and ministry, as well as mull over various writing projects. Of late that has been mostly poetry.
 
Anyone who has discussed this art form with me will know of my love of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Indeed, my youthful work suffered somewhat as I attempted to emulate the unemulatable. ‘Mance on a flattop building’ will hardly be up there with ‘daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon.’
 
Wantage also has the cachet of another, more celebrated, poet, John Betjeman. Once a denizen of the then pretty, small market town, he wrote his farewell in On Leaving Wantage 1972. I have been working on a similar piece about my departure from London’s East End but, as they say in the movie Airplane, ‘That’s not important right now.’
 
One of Hopkins’s wonders is Binsey Poplars in which he laments the destruction, the ‘strokes of havoc’ that ‘unselve’ an avenue of trees. Wantage is one of many expanding towns with new housing to accommodate what successive governments argue has been a response to a crisis.

At the same time, there has been a decline in religious orders in the Western Church. Some, the Community of Saint Mary the Virgin among them, have found their numbers and fortunes seriously affected. How they respond to that is their challenge.
 
Any human development has negative impact. In one area, not far from the convent of the CSMV, there has been an attempt to ensure the survival of a colony of newts while the construction has been rolled out. How successful that is can not be assessed at present.
 
What might be up for assessment is what I penned after one of my walks on retreat there earlier this year.
 
WANTAGE WALK

How can I love you in destruction
When all that’s fair is crushed,
Infinite points beyond construction
Which even silence hushed?
As now I watch the desolation
Of seasons’ growth unblushed,
This view of past years’ contemplation,
Like human waste, all flushed.
Now plastic, brick enshrine creation
And stillness now is rushed.
 
How can I love you? There’s temptation,
Yet in decay I must.
As with all else my destination
Is for dust from dust.
 
© Kevin Scully,  2018

This may interest readers of poetry.

Those hands that take the bread and wine
Are ordinary but special too. They are the same
As everyone else’s. Like his. Yet it’s been decided somehow –
We know the system and the process, but not the why -
To allow those fingers to take the elements and, by grace,
Embody all that for those who gather.
 
So much thought can be made to gather
Around those staples: bread and, for the drinker, wine
Which, still to some people’s amazement, are preceded by Grace
Before the meal. And after too. The same
Word but a different form of words. Why
That should be God-ponderers can work out somehow.
 
Because it is the sum of this that somehow
Breaks through the presence of those who gather
For just that – brokenness – when, how and why
Is still the work of those Theo-thinkers, who wine
And dine on ideas that chew over the same
Simple stuff of wheat and grape which grace
 
The ornate tables and ordinary altars that speak of grace.
Unbroken in crushed and strained grape and grain, somehow
Surviving as they are, but turning in the hearts of the same
Worthy but still unworthy recipients. The crumbs of life gather
To collect with drips of bloodied fruit, fortified wine
That fortifies the gathered. All given in love. Love? Why
 
Else would we need to know the why
And wherefore of this sustaining grace
That sees now your hands – holy hands – fumble with wafer and wine,
Jittery, as the stumbling firsts of all actions, somehow
Emboldened when body and mind seek to gather
The lost threads of dead darkness transformed? The same
 
Yesterday, today and tomorrow. A time of same-
Ness shattered in love. That is why
We need to recall the events done once for all. We gather
To celebrate the living death story of his grace
That, other-worldly as it must be, is somehow
Made manifest each earthly time in bread and wine.
 
The prayers we gather over bread and wine
Are newly the same endlessly in time. Why? Somehow
In every time and clime, he leads us to embrace his grace.

* - there is  a commentary of sorts on this poem

My first verse was published on Sister Margaret Mary's page of the Catholic Weekly in Sydney when I was in primary school. Bless me father, I confess that my Dad worked for the paper, as sub-editor at the time, but the good nun assured me that was not why I made it into print.

Over the years I have had mild success, in minor competitions and now-defunct journals - something of a theme of my life. One of them was Greenwich Window, in which the poem Jimmy Carruthers, appeared in 1974. Readers may like to know that Carruthers was a southpaw bantamweight boxer who was Australia's first world champion.

My most recent published work, As It Is, appeared Live Canon 2017 Anthology.


      JIMMY CARRUTHERS
I saw you. You served me.
You had a shop at Avalon,
Near the beach.
How I dreamed when I saw your belts,
Proud on the wall.
A little boy stared in awe
But all you did was give him a Cherry Ripe.