Contents
Simeon Stylites, January 5
John the Almsgiver, January 23
Don Bosco, January 31
Peter Damian, February 21
Polycarp, February 23
Cuthbert, March 20
Martin I, April 13
Athanasius, May 2
Madrun, June 9
Romualdo, June 19
Mary Magdalen, July 22
Botvid, July 28
Tatwin, July 30
Ignatius Loyola, July 31
Ethelwold, August 1
Etheldritha, August 2
Oswald, August 5
Sixtus, August 6
Gaetano, August 7
Dominic, August 8
Romanus, August 9
Radegund, August 13
Maximilian Kolbe, August 15
Agapitus, August 18
Drithelm, September 1
Disibod, September 8
Peter Claver, September 9
Hugh of Lincoln, November 17
Clement, November 23
Catherine of Alexandria, November 25
Lucy, December 13
Venantius Fortunatus, December 14
Saints and Days
Simeon Stylites
January 5
The aim is to get above yourself. Recipe:
first live four years out on a small platform
fixed firmly atop a nine-foot high pillar,
then up it to eighteen feet for three years,
and then it’s ten years at thirty-three feet.
Lastly let your admirers build you sixty
feet of column and stay up twenty years.
How little they look, how needful they are
for you to manage up and above them!
You are absorbed in prayer and penitence
standing, bending, sitting, getting up, lying,
joining and unjoining the hands, and bending
standing, lying, getting up, sitting, hands
together and apart, except in Lent
you make the routine more intense. No stops
or slowing down then to drop a few words
of homely paraenesis in the straining
all but blocked up ears down there below you.
People brought you unwanted food and drink
which you pulled up in a basket. What waste
came from your shrivelled body just, I guess,
flew off. Anyway your small dirt was holy
and your high odours above human noses.
Now it’s common in our part of the world
to stay up pillars for a lifetime eating
and drinking and doing unusual things.
Now those below run from pillar to pillar
with greens, meat, fruit, cereals, cheese and sugar,
with coffees, omelettes and scrumptious cakes,
without which we would plummet to our deaths.
Some of them have scrambled into our baskets,
and some of us think it’s a long way down.
Maybe you’re happily sitting, Simeon,
on some unbelievable height, and now
and then you might just lean over a moment
and pull some breathless soul up after you.
John the Almsgiver
January 23
Dear John the Almsgiver, I wonder why
you kept back any money or any land,
or given you just kept giving, which was grand,
maybe too much gushed out to be run dry.
Everyone who asked or needed got a hand,
gits, paupers, merchants, the broken and the fly,
monks, the pregnant, those about to die.
No sorting out, nothing to understand.
The messes came from sex clogging the air,
and heresies that pushed in for a fight,
and bloody heathens chortling everywhere.
Let’s just say a gift given you was to see
how just keeping on giving was more right
than backing off or dumping it could be.
Accept I beg my gratefulness to you
for granting us this little interview.
Don Bosco
January 31
wunnav like you Don Bosco
purring yr ans on me ed
n smilin dow,
wunnav like you Don Bosco
gerrin me ter pray
n sin out low,
wunnav like you Don Bosco
makin me appy n canny
like you all time
wunnav like lisnin ter you fer ours,
wunnav like bin fotograbbed wi you
clin n oally oly,
wunnav like plain fubbol wi you,
wunnav like you Don Bosco,
mekkin me a prees,
wunnav like you Don Bosco
sennin me to ChilliPru
ter preas,
wunnav like you Don Bosco
gerrin me ter wor n smy
like you all time,
wunnav like lernin ter ree and ry,
wunnav like bin goo
wunnav like any un like you
clin n oally oly
wunnav like you larkin wi me,
wunnav like you Don Bosco
runnin affer me
like I wer a booa fly Don Bosco
you ed ter kapper
ter kapper mi sol,
wunnav bin kapper
wu av die n you wu av die
wun like gon wi you ter evven,
wun like you sinnin n prain,
clin and oally oly,
like you wun ever leggo mi las lil bi,
wunna go now, OK?
ow, you hurz, dum bo.
(I wouldn’t have liked you, Don Bosco, putting your hands on my head and smiling down. I wouldn’t have liked you , Don Bosco, getting me to pray and sin(g) out loud/ low, I wouldn’t have liked you, Don Bosco, making me happy and canny, like you, all the time, I wouldn’t have liked listening to you for hours, I wouldn’t have liked being photographedwith you, clean and totally holy, I wouldn’t have liked playing football
with you.
I wouldn’t have liked you, Don Bosco, making me a priest, I wouldn’t have liked you sending me to Chile and Peru, to preach, I wouldn’t have liked you Don Bosco, getting me to work and smile like you all the time, I wouldn’t have liked learning to read and write, I wouldn’t have liked being good, I would have liked anyone like you, clean and totally holy, I wouldn’t have liked you larking with me.
I wouldn’t have liked you, Don Bosco, running after me, like I was a butterfly, Don Bosco, that you had to capture, to capture my soul, I wouldn’t have been captured, I would have died and you would have died, I wouldn’t like going with you to heaven, I wouldn’t like you singing/ sinning and praying, clean and totally holy, like you wouldn’t ever let go of my last little bit, I want to go now, OK? Ow, you’re hurting, dumbo.)
Peter Damian
February 21
‘Could God recook the sort of hash our history has made?
You bet your life he can since he cooks what he wants, but you
just keep your little fingers out of his best angel delight.
Stick with down-to-earth stuff, for instance, what’ll happen
to your soul if it’s sprung wriggling from the trap of flesh and fancy
and served up on the judgement table, dirty, fearful, uninviting.
No point then in wishing you’d dipped all your life in holy water,
or mumbling sorry, blaming mummy, asking for ten minutes more,
no, it’s over and they’re waiting down there grinning open-mouthed.
Down there’s the hopeless hoohah which I only recommend,
if you really fancy out-of-this world grilled soul;
oh how you’ll ooze and crackle, we won’t hear it, but you will,
and you’ll screech out for a dousing in the arid flickering dark,
where you baste in your own juices and are never thrown away,
on the fire that sears as much for ever as it first seared the day
your heart hoped for one more spasm, your mouth groped for a groan,
and then the precious timer tinkled going, going, gone.
Oh staring eye, oh wooden lid, let both be shuttered down.
But there’s a different menu which I’d say you ought to like,
served under mellow lighting to the music of the spheres,
where your soul will be the diner and the dishes are divine.
For instance, endless tarts of love meticulously ranged
on shining plates of truth that stay unblemished and replete
though passed round time on time and after time has passed.
And goodnesses and wisdoms and beauties for all tastes
that the eternal chef whisks up with understanding eyes
smiling at all the customers for his eternal feast,
their appetites as happy and their palates as surprised
as when the cheerful waiters, who pulled and pushed them free,
first settled them in comfort and gently whispered, ‘Eat’.!
You’ve seen the adverts, heard the warnings, still you’re here,
waiting as if what has been has to be, and as if what will be
is being cooked up to be much as it was, not worse,
when you could stir yourself afresh. But frozen stock like yours
needs drops of the pure spirit to dissolve.’
In later years
St Peter Damian also took pleasure carving spoons.
Polycarp
February 23
Polycarp, at eighty-six, was up to
being eaten by a lion in front
of those Smyrna fans shouting ‘Atheists
out’. He was with them on that one, he said,,
but he wouldn’t turn down the old friend
who’d stuck by him and he hoped to see shortly.
Germanicus, who was old too, but just
gristle, walked over to a lion, which
bit out his edible bits and ate them
in two shakes. Then Quintus, who was tenderer,
came over faint and signed the pledge, poor soul.
It was a big disappointment, and when
impromptu the governor pronounced that
lions was off forthwith, those Smyrna fans
started roaring and smashing, as they do.
‘Well,’ said the governor getting judicious,
‘have a fire then,’ at which they calmed down pronto,
and everyone ran and got bits of wood.
Polycarp said he’d dreamt of a good fire,
and walked up and sat himself on the pile
smiling, though they tied him for the show’s sake.
‘I’m hoping,’ he told them, ‘to be a fat
and acceptable sacrifice.’ And then
the fire was lit and they all stood there
enjoying the unanticipated turn.
Scholars don’t know how fat Polycarp was,
but the flames curved round him like a ship’s sail
filled by the wind. He looked and smelled as good
as really good bread baking, and some there
caught now and then wafts of superior spices.
An official tested how he was doing
with a dagger on a stick, and a dove
flew out of the wound, followed by enough
blood to put out the fire, which does suggest
he was a man of some size. Bigger than
any of us dodderers here, I’d guess.
Cuthbert
March 20
Well, I never, it’s our Cuthbert,
grandest, shyest northern saint,
back all shiny like his name.
Yoo-hoo, long lost happy Cuthbert,
leave eternal bliss a minute,
come for a cuddle over here.
You who ambled round the northland,
charming with reforms and wonders,
you who left off bishoping
for Lindisfarne and Inner Farne,
you who shared fish with an eagle,
oats with crows and love with ducks.
You who dug a cell with angels
and opened it to friendly souls,
you who’d run and jumped and tumbled,
ran and jumped beyond your legs,
and rotten feet and puffy hams
bounced to heaven through pain and prayer.
Why bother with a final onion?
Herefrid was there to wash you,
and Walstod, who had diarrhoea,
came just in time for you to stop it.
Then you set off from the goodness
and the beauty of the earth.
You who left your friends a body,
that was still as fresh as ever
for eight hundred years or so,
till the faith around it crumbled,
you who faded from our vision
in your vision of delight.
That bliss is that sweet and strong
he can’t tear himself away,
funny how he stays clear-headed,
drinking like that long past time.
But, I’d say, just now he also
turned and managed us a smile.
Martin I
April 13
What man are you, Martin, if you don’t speak
up? With monothelites, Constans, the Typus,
squeezing their evils around everything,
what could be said for silence? Only that
it would have been the really human thing,
and after all how many cared or care?
But no, you went theandric and the divine
bit then crossed back across the wavering line
into Santa Maria Maggiore and
the Romans breathed it in and broke out clapping.
Figures of speech, transient figures that might
be waiting breathless somewhere to return.
The body came back all right; Calliopas
arrived to call you to Constantinople.
A man set on submission, you sailed off
to months of dirt and dysentery, then
came chains, jeering, flogging – yes, you were lucky,
we’d say now, to survive. Which meant you were
sent off to the Crimea, more filth plus famine.
Your letters (seventeen survive) complain
you’ve been forgotten back in long-lost Rome
by those whose souls you keep on praying for.
Last of the martyr popes, still witnessing
are you, evils being coiled around us too?
Athanasius
May 2
Let’s say one for Athanasius, who repelled
the logic splitters and the splinterers of
the unity of action, thought and love,
one for Athanasius, who upheld
the innocence from which we were expelled,
who gave expedience and lust the shove
and kept one eye down here and one above,
one for the real and perfect meld,
that took in the full mess that it had made,
as well as all the good bits out on show,
and bit the bitterest in the pot and paid,
thinking that there was nothing else to do.
And Athanasius wanted us all to know
and say with him the all he said and knew.
One or two shells still have some echoes in them:
best shake them in your ears before you bin them.
Madrun
June 9
Saint Madrun, you’re being most elusive, you are,
with the three kids you had to run off with,
having looked after Tathan, that Irish missionary,
(Tathaeus), and thus to Trwfynydd you went.
Were you Vortimer’s daughter,
the one married to the great Ynir Gwent,
with that brother Vortigern who got slaughtered?
You fled to Cornwall and that’s all there is to it,
except in Trwfynydd they remembered
you for centuries. Unless it was Materiana,
who arrived in Cornwall with Brican et al.
In Madrun they remembered Madernus or Madron,
also long gone, not you Saint Madrun,
little lost zipper into eternity.
I’m trying to run you up and down,
trailing the scrunched wonder of your virtue.
April 9th might also be the day for you,
October 19th, which is also Ethbin’s or Egbin’s, too.
Ah the fugitive, now she’s flown.
Romualdo
June 19
Romualdo stomped up and down Italy
acting the cheerful action-monk,
temporarily
slapping sloppy King Otho into shape,
temporarily
yanking his mad dad out
of his murderous gloom,
and again and again and again
jabbing at the fatted Benedictines
who arose at dawn and dusk
to mouth exquisite hymns.
Then he stomped off to try to save Slavs
for a while,
then it was back to stomping up and down Italy
for a while,
until Maldolus gave him a field
in wildest Tuscany
to put a hut up in
where he could help his fans
sort their souls out.
‘Just sit and watch
your thoughts swimming up like fishes
and then swimming away,’
he said. ‘Just keep on singing
the Psalms and thinking
what each word is singing.
If you wander, go back
and start singing again.
This is Paradise and you’re
up before its Emperor,
chicks with an empty tum,
waiting for the mother-hen
and the only seed you can eat.’
That lasted a good few years.
Then off on his own he stomped
to a shack he hid
deep in the high mountain-wood.
There he sang and waited
emptily, except for
that smidgeon of the divine company
that surely turned up
and finally carried him happily
over the hump.
Mary Magdalen
July 22
She looks so good in pictures,
with those long loose waves of hair
curling and falling over her flesh;
her soft lips part in prayer,
and tears glisten
in her heavenly eyes.
Do not touch
makes her the lovelier.
And the flesh rises and asks again
for playtime, wonders
why it should ever have been gainsaid,
careless of droops and cankers.
The skull on the chair,
the jar of oil, the lamp,
the discarded pearls and mirror,
are there just to adorn her.
And the gardeners, prostitutes,
perfumers and hairdressers
do not look now to those rarer images
of the shrivelled haggard doll,
trying to push through the crowds,
for help.
Large and calm in Arezzo,
in her robe of chiselled green
and cloak of carved white and russet,
Mary Magdalen holds out her lamp
(its flame hiding behind the thick glass)
as if it were a weightless gift
to herself and whoever is looking.
Her neck is strong, her face youthful,
her hair a bit untidy,
and her eyes half-closed.
They seem to reflect back on the world below
unalterable concern,
and her rueful lips might at any moment
sketch out a smile and speak:
So much world has to be let go, but there’s
still so much that you couldn’t expect,
even for you, my poor friends.
Botvid
July 28
Swedish Bodvid
got saved in England
and sailed back to Sweden
to help saving Swedish souls,
with a mulch of good words:
Glug a dee, glug a doo.
But charity needs to grow,
and he bought himself a Finn,
whom he saved and set free
to help save and free more
mired Finnish souls.
Glug a dee, glug a doo.
The two and a mate
took a boat and rowed off
on the thick Baltic waters.
for the forests and lakes of Finland,
lost in their summer rest,
wick with pagan buzz.
Glug a dee, glug a doo.
En route the Finn did the others in
and rowed vigorously on,
and Botvid’s saving ended
in the story of a bird guiding
his friends to the bodies
with its droppings of song:
Glug a dee, glug a doo.
Maybe you could still dig up
one verse or another,
one relic or another of bone,
in Botkyrka, if you poked about
in the mud by the church
for something to save.
Glug a dee, glug a doo.
Tatwin
July 30
Enigmatic Tatwin, the Canterbury riddler,
pious, prudent, and bookish in the wild 8th century,
also did miracles (or so they said),
though now he is undoubtedly unprayed to.
He once imagined himself a marvellous being
with two big arms and gaping jaws,
who could face any obstacle
however hard or rough or hot,
and intrepidly grasp it in his tongs
and hold onto it till it crumbled
to nothingness.
He knew all along
he was putting up a piddling fight with evil,
but rated the humility that he felt afterwards
a substantial success,
which any honed and hungry hardman
finds truly unbelievable,
as you don’t need me to tell you.
Ignatius Loyola
July 31
Old hopalong Loyola
could be a person
worth meeting on a dark night of the soul,
swinging his exercise book over your head
to light you through desolation
(via immolation if need be),
obedient and consoled.
Look at the persons on the face of the earth killing, going to Hell, etc.
Look at the Divine Persons working out the Incarnation, etc.
Look at the Angel doing what an ambassador should.
Look at the Virgin being humble and grateful.
Then think about it.
A person who is old or weak
or one who has weakened from week one
might in week two
omit the midnight contemplation,
and just do the morning, mass, and before lunch sessions,
with a repetition round Vespers,
and then the Application of the Senses before supper.
Oh Ignatius, Ignatius,
you were not unlovable or impatient,
and tonight it’s spicy focaccia and lustrous Côte du Rhône.
Ooh, yes.
Ethelwold
August 1
Pow!
It was always all go with Ethelwold,
with rebuilding and reviving,
with aqueducts, walls, illuminations,
and the new polyphonic music,
with tutoring and counselling,
copying and reading,
translations of rules and relics,
and then
the biggest organ in the country
(two players, four hundred pipes and thirty-six bellows),
oh, he was, they said, the father of monks,
and the missionaries went off into Scandinavia
and Abingdon and Winchester and all of South England
sang.
And he cooked,
and was up working on the scaffolds,
till he fell and broke his ribs,
that was our Ethelwold,
the energiser, the uncomfortable,
the unsleepy.
He was given the tonsure
by St Alphege the Bald -
a reminder that some parts are
to be kept bare and spare,
even if you can’t see them.
(But I imagine him polishing and polishing
with some adventitious rag
as he was rushing round
till his pate like pewter shone.)
Etheldritha
August 2
Think about Etheldritha,
who was not dejected when her father the king
slew her intended, but withdrew
into the Lincolnshire marshlands,
as she knew she would.
She prayed and prophesied
in her hermitage for forty years
and then she died,
as she knew she would.
Papery hands come together,
the jaws sketch an all but toothless smile
and there is an off-putting smell -
the sweetish odour of sanctity
that seemed to have finally dispersed
after eight-hundred or so years,
five-hundred or so years ago.
Oswald
August 5
Oswald and his chums went walloping through the North,
chopping the pagans down to the ground,
including Cadwallon, the worst of the horrible,
and blood ran in rivers and victory shone
and Oswald had signed Heavenfield with his cross.
A fine-looking fellow who ruled and prayed fiercely,
who gave to the poor and united his kingdom.
When the pagans of Mercia came walloping back
and blood ran in rivers at Salop, then he at his falling
bawled a prayer for the chums tumbling into the dark,
He was chopped into pieces and his head and arms hung
out to dry on a tree for Woden to wiggle.
But the head stayed as good and as fresh as before,
and it and the other bits were, people found,
preternaturally active as well as intact -
particularly the splendid Peterborough arm,
under permanent watch in its purpose-built chapel.
And even the dirt of the ground where he died
worked minor wonders. From Bardney to Bamberg,
from Carlisle to Carinthia, he’d drop back in to help.
‘God gemiltsa urum sawlum’, ‘Deus miserere animabus’;
old words for us who depute our walloping and chopping,
and live on for now in the half-light of unwonder, St Oswald.
Sixtus
August 6
Pope Sixtus took the point that heretics were not all evil
and even those who disagreed
had to admire his firm tranquillity,
the more so when the soldiers came for him
and his deacons preaching just off the Appian Way.
He would have taken the point of their swords too
but in fact they cut off their heads –
gurgle, gush and snap.
Get ready, cheer up, think of the immortality
but whatever you do don’t worship the gods
they insist any reasonable person puts up with –
so said St Cyprian, who a few months later
put his own head where his mouth had been.
Why do I see only shaking heads and knees,
my own being particularly wobbly?
Gaetano
August 7
You launched the Forty Hour Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament,
the Oratory of Divine Love,
and the Congregation of Clerks Regular or Theatines.
The syllables still float through the deep columnar gloom.
But the Virgin did appear to you,
the second time when you were dying,
which must have buoyed you up.
You have become the patron of gamblers,
the unemployed and job-seekers,
some of whom must also rise more lightly
if they sink upon their knees’ despair
and stay there whispering madly to you for a while.
Dominic
August 8
The picture shows black and white dog with torch.
It’s in a fog through which it’s trying to lead
some clever visitors who think they
are taking it for an outing.
What did you do when the fires started
in Provence, hound-dog? Not just walk about in the smoke
talking to the barbecued,
and the happy holidaymakers cooking them.
No, you were a reading and singing dog,
a writing, thinking doctor-dog,
who also painted the fired-up devotees,
poor souls becoming angelic.
Woof, you try, woof, and I can just make you out
shaking an old newspaper in your jaws
as if its news can be kept burning.
Romanus
August 9
You are just known as Romanus, just about known, I mean,
no wonder (I say ruefully) I don’t know what to say
when you turn up this morning,
indifferent looking with a tab saying ‘good’
on one side and ‘soldier’ on the other.
You certainly will not be amazed by any excuse
after close on twenty centuries
of slipshod irony and dumb insolence,
you who handed in your rights as citizen and soldier,
together with your name,
for the whole lot to be torn up with your body,
the recoup anticipated in heaven,
where there is no anonymity for anyone
and everyone is at their best.
Radegund
August 13
In the end Radegund managed to get herself away from
her horrid husband (the king) and into her nunnery,
where she and her sweet companions
sewed and sang and copied and read and prayed,
outsiders who stayed just a little in touch with the insiders,
e.g. the Emperor, from whom she managed to extract
relics and jewelled gospels and a bit of the Cross too,
which pilgrims came from all Franconia to see.
It was overwhelming and at last she managed to get herself
walled up in her cell to pray and meditate.
That lasted for a decade or more - not a world record,
but I can manage five minutes at most on a good day,
and only a little more on a bad one.
Her nuns lined up on the nunnery walls wailing
when her body was borne out beneath them.
It was a grand send-off, with Gregory of Tours officiating,
even if they couldn’t help wanting her back
from Paradise now she had finally got past all
the fripperies they too would soon have to leave behind.
Maximilian Kolbe
August 15
It’s pretty unexciting stuff,
this shopping, this going to the dentist’s
this gardening. The switches of sun and rain are unpredictable,
but there seems not much to be said about them in the end,
or maybe I’m just not looking enough.
You found something to say, Maximilian,
when everyone was stripped down
and had to see what it was impossible to refuse or waylay -
not much to be said about that either.
Were the ones you talked with
(gaunt, sleepless, shivering, afraid etc)
were they consoled?
Did the words console you?
Could everyone hide in them a while?
The dark abominable voice
snakes up, I think, and coils round all of us sometime,
but you took it in your hand
(did it tremble terribly?
was it mortally still?)
and exposed an iridescent throat,
that became truly your own.
How can I say that?
How can I say that as the knife came down yet again
the dove was reborn and flew away singing?
Agapitus
August 18
The sword crossing your neck
was an angel’s wing, I guess,
which dipped fiercely down
into your blood and then rose
just as implausibly, bearing
your soul balanced like an egg
on the tip of an unheard feather.
What a bet to make
when you are fifteen
and the plumes are shimmering
and the music has to be loud!
For years they thought
you alighted intact
and then hatched into perfect song.
What fools they must have been!
But not necessarily wrong.
Drithelm
September 1
Your soul left your sick body one evening
and then in the morning came back babbling.
No wonder everyone ran off,
except for the wife, though she was terrified too.
A shining guide showed you round
- first souls hopping from ice to fire,
from fire to ice, hoping for paradise,
then it was dark fog and a large, smelly hole,
from which bubbled balls of black fire, and screeches, and laughter,
and devils with tongs who came after you,
but your guide chased them off and took you
to a walled flower-garden where young people in white
were singing together in sunshine, waiting for the big day,
and after that it brightened up even more and you actually
sniffed the fragrance of heaven and heard its music.
You gave everything away,
except for your story, which you kept back
from the bored, layabout public,
saved it for the few real enthusiasts -
people like King Alfred, Bishop Ethelwald,
and Hemgils the hermit, who told it to Bede and then left
for an old age of coarse bread, cold water and solitude in Ireland.
You stayed fasting and praying in Northumbria.
You’d stand up to your neck in the river and pray,
breaking the winter ice to pray there, if need be,
and drying yourself after only with sunlight.
‘Tha can fair thoil t’ cowd,’ they’d say.
‘Ah’ve seen war,’ you’d say.
‘But tha’s fair moithering thissen,’ they’d say.
And you, ‘Ah’ve seen war.’
You were, wrote Bede, a man of much simplicity and indifferent wit,
who forwarded the salvation of many.
Disibod
September 8
You walked out of holy Ireland because it wasn’t,
walked with your mates into the exile
we are all shuffling round in nowdays,
and got holiness up and back on its feet
in one itty-bit of old Germany.
A tower, a flower, a refreshing dew,
wrote Hildegarde of you four centuries later,
when Disibodenberg was not upstanding any more,
but you were still worth talking to.
That was nine hundred years ago,
and towers and flowers and dew
were not just postcard butterflies,
and your name wasn’t just a dry seed-pod
for them to flutter dizzily up and down around.
Peter Claver
September 9
What notes to play, sunbeam,
God ones, filth ones, black ones,
and in you went strumming
your obstinate lute,
into the vast Cartagena market,
hole of holes,
slave of slaves.
Oh burnt sugar,
oh branded skin,
oh suppuration,
as the dying fall.
But thousands stayed alive enough
to be sold on and slave away,
away on the estates sweetening Europe,
chanting their lost chords
way away from our eyes.
And you kept on with the lute,
after you were robbed by one you had half-saved
who left you half-paralysed.
Still you went on (let me believe)
moistening lips with sweet brandy,
clouding eyes with sweet tunes.
The moneymakers praised your holiness,
and turned out besuited for your funeral,
as if they too could be saved.
Then your name waited three hundred years
for the sticky stamp of sainthood.
Oh sweet rotting,
oh death by sweetness,
oh shine of black sugar -
to think no other voice was heard,
not even of despair.
Hugh of Lincoln
November 17
So there you are, St Hugh,
up in a corner-niche above the bike-stands
in Magdalen Street,
looking neat and weighty in the stone vestment
chiselled out by some artisan
around 1880 AD, I’d guess,
with a gothic name-tag under your feet
from which to unpick your identity.
You hold a model cathedral carefully,
as if it might break.
There is no trace of the swan
once painted by you by Zurbaràn.
The fineness of your face signals desire,
and your unseeing eyes have been fixed on
something in the upper air or beyond,
beyond the bicycles wheeling dangerously
through the revolving streets,
or locked up as if they could be kept still.
How many times have I not noticed you,
since all I have is such a lot to do?
Today my eyes rise up towards you,
and you come out, saying ‘Hello, I’m Hugo’,
and you go on and on about the powerful
and their ridiculous violence,
prayer, building, the poor and sick, silence.
Then you’re back in hiding,
while I fiddle with the padlock here,
so I can pedal out of hope and fear.
Achilles ponders in his tent.
The kings of modern thought are dumb.
The crux stays still and the world goes round.
But, all being said and done,
it’s nice for a swan to have a saint,
I say, and a saint a swan.
Sh, sh, whispers Hugo,
(doing a quick pianissimo comeback)
let’s go over what I said again,
then you go over it again
by yourself when I’ve gone,
if by some chance or grace you can.
Clement
November 23
Sometimes the tide unpredictably recedes,
out there beyond the last hints of wrack and weeds;
the eye strays over the enormous beach
picking up odd bits or signals within reach,
and then drops them, there’s so much to see,
or nothing much, zilch in reality,
except a slice of horizon and a bowl of sky
that look less and less appetizing every day they pass us by,
and occasionally an exceptionally low tide
shows something you’d have preferred it to hide,
an anchor, say, protruding sharply from the mud,
though the boat and chain have gone for good,
and if you can focus, you see the rust disperse,
and a box of stripped-down bones appears,
with a big, cheerful angel standing by
who raises his dazzling wings into the lowering sky.
Mm, Clement told the Corinthians to hold tight
since everything was vanishing from sight,
including himself, and then got on with the work
that had emerged briefly from the murk.
After that it had always to be fished out again,
cleaned up, tasted, repackaged, posted on,
except when, say, bones and anchor were noticed nearby,
not likeable nor likely signs, but ones for which to die.
Catherine of Alexandria
November 25
You are one nonexistent girl.
Fifty philosophers downed by your impossible babble
run off shrieking into Alexandrian blah,
and then all those noble ladies who look into your fetid cell
are seized by its sense and hoist themselves up for martyrdom,
which mad Maxentius magnanimously hands out,
not knowing it is the real maccoy.
Flappy happy angels are floating overhead,
ready to swoop into the crush
and scoop soul after soul into heaven.
Unperturbed by the kerfuffle,
untouched by the scourging of virgin skin
that the sweating boyos can’t wait to doff,
nor their trim commander
for all his controlling glamour,
you pass through the crowd,
and step up to the wheel,
which today has ornamental spikes along the rim.
Your body is gaily spread across it and tied.
Now the wheel is slowly to turn and at each turn a gentleman
with a magnificent hammer
is to break a delicate limb,
and when each broken limb
comes round again, he is to break it again
and so on, and so forth,
until well after you have died.
But today heaven gets in the way,
and the wheel accelerates,
until it is whirling like the firework
named after you,
showering coloured sparks and smoke.
Then it spins amok, its spikes springing blood
from action men and onlookers alike
into the beaming sun,
while you, at its still centre,
continue cheerfully to pray.
It was awesome, dear damsel,
and the casualties could have been enormous.
To redeem the situation, Maxentius,
madder than ever and more mighty,
orders a quick decapitation.
From your head flows milk.
Where are you now,
saint of students and philosophers,
of wheelwrights and spinners,
of young girls and nurses,
of the moribund,
legend and curiosity since 1969?
Now you will always be not quite there,
as the rest of us tend to be on this planet,
but somehow maybe you can still home in on us,
with sweet milk streaming from your head.
God, what an off-putting thing to think of,
and to think she’s streaming love.
Lucy
December 13
Ah, Lucy, about whom nobody
knows owt,
except maybe you were cruelly
martyred under Diocletian.
The Venetian bits aren’t yours,
and the French head isn’t,
and your story has been cruelly
plucked from you too.
It lies there at your side,
like your eyes.
Who cares? Here you come
when the days are short and dreary,
with bundles of light,
tossing out sticks of it,
like sticks of rock,
for witless beggars to catch.
It brightens us up a lot,
seeing more clearly,
even if the weather turns cruel
as the winter hardens.
Or so they said.
But you won’t know, will you,
if you don’t reach out, don’t catch one,
don’t drop it, don’t fall.
Poor suckers for sweetness,
let’s hold on tight now
as we melt.
Venantius Fortunatus
December 14
Time to get personal,
Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus,
though my tongue is as thick as the snow outside
and won’t spark whatever way I pull it,
whereas yours was constantly on go,
pushing out warm verse from Poitiers
to Radegund, Gogo, Sigisberth, Berthichild, Faramodus,
and all your other famous friends,
sheltering in the Lord as best they could
from the unforseeable dangers of 6th-century Gaul
which were set to worsen over the whole of Europe
after you had left, one and all, for the tranquillity of Paradise.
Thank you for the rabbit, the milk, the invitation.
The doctor says no, but it’s your love that counts.
Well done with that church, keep up the virginity,
and you are, Sigisberth, the greatest ruler of all.
Brunhildis has joined us, Virgil is here too with Homer,
and spring airs rise through the resonant ice.
Amalafried it is not just your name that stays with me,
and you, Galeswintha, you too never can leave.
The Seine has hold of you, Rucco, me English waves circle,
and Amalafried and Galeswintha are no more to be seen.
But say what you want, our juices have blended for ever
in love’s ever-travelling, metamorphic heat.
And up bubbled those songs - ‘The king’s flags are up and coming’,
‘Get the tongue around the story of the glorious rough and tumble’, -
that simmered in human mouths,
true and false, for at least a thousand years.
Now that the weather is worsening here,
I should have liked to spend an evening or two
chatting with you by some smoky fire,
sharing warm red wine, warm bread
and maybe crispy chicken legs,
most comfortable, companionable and courteous of saints,
who I can imagine agreeing with the general view
that you were never a saint at all.
I should have a few of my own famous friends along,
say Robey, Sheringham, Faram,
who don’t believe in any saints or God, plus myself,
Peter Richard Jack Hainsworth,
whose tongue-tied Latin you would smilingly put up with.
This sort of gathering is awkward at first,
but, when conversation turns to the dreadful state of things,
we are suddenly all in it together and all for a few minutes OK,
before you have to get back to the real world
and we wrap ourselves up and leave.
.