Many thanks to John Halton for forwarding this devastating poem along, from the recently deceased British beat poet Adrian Mitchell. Talk about (the right kind of) theology from the bottom up! As John points out in his post, the final couplet is a particular killer:
I remember God as an eccentric millionaire,
Locked in his workshop, beard a cloud of foggy-coloured hair,
Making the stones all different, each flower and disease,
Putting the Laps in Lapland, making China for the Chinese,
Laying down the Lake of Lucerne as smooth as blue-grey lino,
Wearily inventing the appendix and the rhino,
Making the fine fur for the mink, fine women for the fur,
Man’s brain a gun, his heart a bomb, his conscience – a blur.Christ I can see much better from here,
And Christ upon the Cross is clear.
Jesus is stretched like the skin of a kite
Over the cross, he seems in flight
Sometimes. At times it seems more true
That he is meat nailed up alive and pain all through.
But it’s hard to see Christ for priests. That happens when
A poet engenders generations of advertising men.
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5 responses to “Quite Apart From The Holy Ghost – Adrian Mitchell”
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Thanks for the link – glad you enjoyed the poem. 🙂
damn
I loved this, DZ. So moving. Thanks for posting it.
(sorry for the deleted comment…I still have a fever and hit the wrong button by mistake…)
Yes, I know what Mitchell means, and but then I encountered these lines from Updike's Endpoint: he's in the hospital, having just received his diagnosis of lung cancer, and says
"A clergyman-those comic purveyors
of what makes sense to just the terrified-
has phoned me, and I loved him, bless his hide.
Wow, that is an amazing line from Updike! Thank you so much, Robin.