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.

I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, of bears;

How, thanks to salmon, the Brown and Kodiak

Are largest but, being hungry, the Grizzly scares

The seasoned hunter most. Should any attack,

However, the thing to do’s curl up like a baby,

Protecting vital organs. Then, maybe,

You’d live to tell the tale to a spellbound friend.

But this is a world away from Essex, England.

Bad days can jog on.

They start so well, so normally,

Nothing in them to augur the wrong

They hide, which spills so rapidly

From the first inconvenience

On down to evening’s shorted sense.

Wine helps, and love, and prayer.

Grant us an unproblematic week,

Grant us a workload we can bear,

Grant us uninterrupted sleep.

And if this is too much to ask,

Make us equal to the task.

Most of them are bent double,

sun-spotted, hard of sight,

can’t hear much without trouble;

heads shrivelled, some bald, some white.

They sing – one cannot say ‘as one’ –

even now with all the gusto

of children, their own long flown and gone.

Perhaps I shall see them tomorrow…

Or more likely send at once for Father.

He (doubt tells them) can absolve

them of the lives they might rather

have ended elsewhere than here, where love

need meet the stranger’s awkward eye

in that vast uninhabited wood.

Finally the old bones stand and sigh.

Ah, well, they say, this news was good.

It gets chilly this time of year –

inside, I mean; the heart slows,

likewise thinking; old fears

come out of hiding with the woodstove

at the unknown hour. A log spits.

What brute has gathered me up

to be this person now, who sits

when all are sleeping with his cup?

I hold it like a sorrow, afraid

morning shall greet the self-same failure

and all my loves see me unmade,

See what I see in the mirror,

Some spirit or spectre, weaker now

than when his breath savoured of hope.

I shudder to bed – yet must allow

that what the child in me once spoke –

Conversant in happiness, keen

of vision and the innocent desire

to heal, as youth will, the mean

perplexities of elders – shall cry

again. Till then, incumbent light

pours through old panes and curtains.

I wait patiently for night;

for there at least thought is uncertain.

And so as a walker of hills

Is your acquaintance made – 

Who thrills

With a reverent artist’s hand

Upon the Ark of this land

Into the dove-shaped cave.