Pandemic Triptych I: Chaos
Seeded in chaos and mystery,
Pandemic gifts creativity.
Why, when
innocent die,
And
bloodstained hands profiteer in their reckless rule,
Are pandemics
creative?
We wield
words in the lathes of our hearts.
In wisdom,
we wrestle, with the furnaces of our souls.
Our ancestors
stood undefeated by chaos,
In the pandemics
of their time.
And we,
the poets of our day, are their inheritance.
Dreadnoughtian
before the fear,
Propaganda
and lies of this pandemic age.
Our descendants
must know the poets of this age,
Are not
cowered, nor “bowed the knee to Baal”[1].
In the
warp and the woof of chaos “unweeting”,
Mr John Martin’s
bridge carry’s eternal chaos home.
Held high in
the hard, cold majestic puritan caverns,
Of Mr John
Milton’s warm satanic fierce fiery embrace.[2]
In mystery
pandemic creativity gifts.
To craft
in our hearts the epic poems of our age.
O’er the seraph’s
six-winged hinged,
Political
and theological illiteracies of our day.[3]
Artists tallboy
sentry stand:
In musician’s
score,
In liturgically
literate gay hymnwriter’s,
In painter’s
canvas,
In sculptured
brave black women.
With our ancestors
we dare,
Dream of a
better day.
We the
poets called to this dismembered time.
In chaos
remember words.[4]
© Lottie E. Allen
The Feast of St David, 1 March
In the Year of Our Lord Two
Thousand and Twenty-One
[1]
I Kings 19 v 18.
[2]
In 1826 John Martin
published his plate “Bridge over Chaos”, an interpretation of Satan’s new
bridge from Hell to Heaven that John Milton crafted in Book X of Paradise Lost
(Lines 312 to 347). There “[Satan’s] guileful act, By Eve, though all
unweeting, seconded upon her husband” (Line 334-346).
[3]
Isaiah 6 v 2 and
Revelation 4 v 8.
[4]
The English word “remember”
is the opposite of “dismember”.
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