What is the Anglican genius?

Victoria sponge or carrot cake

With the vicar is surely serious,

And mumbling ambivalence

A break from the certainties of Rome.

Archbishop Justin Welby works from home.

Its clergy, unlike the Orthodox,

Seldom sport hats or beards.

Ordinands wear odd socks.

Priests buy parishioners beers.

Many would rather chairs than wooden pews.

Most read the Guardian for most of their views.

What is the Anglican genius,

In what does it lie, of what composed?

Is it saintly or devious?

Can it be stated in prose?

And is it, moreover, doctrinally sound?

Is it silly and shallow or rich and profound?

Goodbyes feel so like grieving. We hug and kiss,

Wave cartoonishly and then are gone,

Carried to intolerable distances.

I wonder if in fact goodbyes are wrong,

That human beings were not made to miss,

Or look to meagre memory in recalling

How it was to feel so permanent.

Outside of time, perhaps, these sad leavings

Would not intrude on what we always meant

To say: I love you. And this feels so like falling.

Glabella- and crow-lines furrow the brow,

Elephantine eyes

Look out over the clownish proboscis

To landscapes of limestone and ice,

Where the lips of an active crater pump

Ash from a burning fag.

Down flops the fringe like a tuft of cirrus

Or a filthy rag.

To allegations the face was a mask

With what could the countenance counter?

Except that you had spent a life

Collapsing inner and outer:

That soul and body have no bounds

And marriage starts at sex.

Admiring boys in Ischia

Spurs the Intellect.

Pachydermoperiostosis

At any rate’s disease;

The broken tea-cup of your face

Would to the Japanese

Have been occasion to fill with gold

The deep fissures and lines – 

Containing ore, you would become

Your cherished Yorkshire mines.

Like the silhouetted towers

Of that machinery,

You were neither good nor bad,

For on the scenery

Of each man’s face has been inscribed

His competence in both;

How well you understood, however,

That only the kind of love

That comes as instinct to the child

Could recommend our nature;

Humbly to play, as children do,

We learn to be mature,

Not minding the appearance we cut

At corner-shops in slippers,

Or giving speeches to a crowd

With a gaping zipper.

You slept outside the doors of widows

Fearful of the dark,

Gave money to the impoverished,

Made kind remarks,

Thought highly, early, of The Hobbit,

Married Erika Mann,

Lent support to Spain and China,

Indulged young fans;

Meanwhile, loosed upon our language

And our collective era,

Your sonic ambulance descended

To Love’s conflicted hearers.

In these and other acts of perfect

Self-disinterest,

You are remembered, after all,

Wystan, for having blessed.

Sitting at the table alone,

I light two candles and watch the flames

Bend over and back up again,

As if some secret draught had blown

Them and which I, more rough than they,

Could never feel. But who’s to say

Their sudden phosphorescent chance

Clean into being at the hands

Of one they could not understand

Is not the reason candles dance?

I blow. Two skeins of smoke ascend,

And I, for having watched them spend

Their brief existence burning bright,

Rejoice; for that which ushered man

From Being-not to Being can

Be known and loved. It is the light

That never darkens and ever yields,

A light this Easter Day revealed.

Dear Mr Hitchens, I owe you my gratitude.

You caught me young, just young enough to learn

That politics and religion are worth being rude

About at the dinner table, and not to wait one’s turn

So long as one avoids the kind of feud

Best reserved for the evil and the crazy:

Bill Clinton, Kissinger, Khomeini.

Yes, that was the first of many things

Your eloquence inspired me to esteem.

Keeping schtum in an argument rings

False when a question of principle means

Speaking up’s a duty; silence brings

A good deal of wisdom but boredom too

(An effect inapplicable to you).

Sometimes I wonder how you pulled it off.

Of course you went to Oxford, but then a Third

Hardly betokens success, and you weren’t a toff,

And you were much too wayward to join that herd

Of Lenin’s useful idiots who doffed

Their caps at every monster in fatigues

Whose every word the true believers believed.

Maybe that was it: your atheism

Bestowed you doubtless (or do I mean doubtfully?)

With a certain star status; your schisms

Were those of the left-wing revolutionary,

Your passions always tinged with scepticism

Of the man in cloth, the salt-and-pepper beard

Of pontificating imams, the religious weird.

And yet (the title of one of your collections)

No man or woman of faith was ever barred

On that account from the orbit of your affections.

People, combined especially with hard

Liquor, received equally your attention

So long as they were willing to entertain

Your infamous familiar refrains

About how God, to parrot Randolph Churchill,

Was all things considered a massive shit.

You lived for it: the demagogic thrill

Of scoring for the audience a hit

On circumcision or Ezekial.

They say the Bible belt’s never been drier.

You blew in like Zarathustra’s town crier.

And what a voice to cry with! A larynx soaked

Quite literally in Johnnie Walker Black;

A voice to make one laugh – until it croaked

It, and the tongue fell still, never to come back.

Thank goodness for recordings: although I’d hoped

To hear you live, we have you on demand.

I met you on the internet. Charmed.

Now I see I’m skirting close to death.

Esophageal cancer’s quite a bitch.

Swallow. Wince. Call the nurse. Draw breath.

But ‘capitalism: downfall’ ... seriously, Hitch?

Anyway, poetic. You claimed the left

Left you and not the other way around:

Confronted by Saddam it made no sound.

At any rate you’re gone, your absence a raw

Deal for we who have some sympathy

With all that the Enlightenment stood for.

Now more than ever. The attack on Salman Rushdie

Boils the blood. You’d blame religion. Sure.

It’s perfectly true that believing the world was made

For us brings out the bullets, bombs and blades.

I say that much to cover up my tracks.

God and I are on speaking terms, you see.

Does that matter? It happened six years back.

I blame my Catholic university.

I can already hear your celestial verbal slap.

Which begs the question: are you in Heaven or Hell?

Or neither? I’d love to ask you now, but, well…

So things stand at any rate. In truth

I’ve no regrets. The Bible’s a roaring read

Believed in, and very beautiful, too. There’s Ruth,

The Song of Solomon, Job. Eve.

Next in line is the confessional booth.

I’d offer to pray for you but have my suspicions

That since no prayer effected your remission

You’d sooner tell me where to shove it. O

Hitch! we could use that now. Each day

Brings fresh stupidities. Let’s see… oh,

That’s right – you saw it coming I daresay – 

The tanks at present rolling out of Moscow

To bombard the European breadbasket

Where little children fall asleep in caskets.

This recrudescence of barbarity

Would not, I think, have come as a surprise;

You liked Goya, after all. See:

Even the most secular must surmise

That sin exists, if not seminally 

Then thanks to ill-evolved prefrontal lobes

And big adrenal glands and useless toes.

That said, the Ukranians are fighting fierce, all told.

They managed to take Kherson back. Kiev

Remains defiant. Zelensky’s looking old.

We’ve been instructed to pronounce it ‘Keev’.

The Russians have cut off gas. The Germans are cold.

In Britain, too, we’re braced for a chill few months.

The clocks are turning back. We check for lumps.

It’s like we’re living in a book by Orwell:

Blackouts and rationing are on the cards,

Some thoughts are sheer verboten, some compelled,

Energy bills have hit the poorest, hard.

Oranges and lemons say the bells

Of St Clemens. Dictators strut with grim bravura.

A moustachioed consumptive moves to Jura – 

But in that much, Hitch, your hero could not have been

More different to you, the famously vigorous.

No sooner was George in arms than shot clean

In the throat (thereafter he sounded timorous).

And Eric Arthur Blair was seldom seen

As you were at the front of queueing brunettes.

Or was it blondes you preferred? I forget.

There’s more: he was thin and you were fat;

His prose was plain, yours a lexical feat.

The list goes on and yet, for all that,

On certain points of principle you meet – 

The power for instance of facing unpleasant facts

Would come in handy now, when women are men

And men are women and 2+2 is 10

And presidents non compos mentis struggle

To outperform a man with orange skin,

And believers in biology are muggles

And words are violence and the violent win,

And childhood gaffs get adults into trouble

And activistic students can determine

If the Dead White Male is good – or vermin.

Or might you have applauded some of these

Twenty-first century developments?

You of all people would be displeased

Were thoughts not yours the basis of your judgement

By the living. Perhaps you would have seized

By some internal logic on the cause

To racialise the Constitution’s laws.

Your argued, after all, for reparations,

Thought Leon Trotsky the quintessential hack,

Grew misty-eyed at the inauguration

Of a man you’d call a megalomaniac.

I dread to think your thoughts upon taxation.

The question, though, is this: would you be ‘woke’?

Hardly. You drank too much, were Jewish, smoked.

What I myself am left with, then, is this:

An Englishman, like French Montaigne, replete

With contradictions; your written words were fists

In a battle no one ever sees complete:

Contra terrorism’s promised bliss,

Contra bullies, liars, fraudsters, snake-oil,

Contra Iran-contra, contra tinfoil

Hats, Flat Earth, Intelligent Design,

All the idiocies that flesh is heir to.

Permit this never-ending pact malign

Your stances, for you more than others knew

What happens to a Courage of its time:

Events are forgotten and arguments recede,

But the sort who made them, the present learns to need.