The Passion and Resurrection Canticles

(c) John Robert Lee

The Passion and Resurrection Canticles

  

John Robert Lee

Easter 2017

Castries, Saint Lucia

The Passion and Resurrection Canticles

(for Charles Cadet)

I.

Prologue: The alabaster flask

  

Over the bowed Head, the anointing oil of nard

pours from Mary’s broken alabaster flask—

certainly, she filled that room with the fragrant adoration of her Lord;

certainly, even then, some grudged Him that embalming, with their indignant jealousy—

you heard it in the thief’s voice, sneering at the poor;

and the Master, raising His burial, raising her memorial, raises their approaching loss,

beyond the maddening fragrance of the pure

ointment. But the bedeviled thief rose in envy, and over Christ, his bottled hatred broke.

  

Caiaphas

“Who is this, this peasant prophet, wailing shoah on the city?

What is this riot of rags and branches down the thoroughfare?

And why this bacchanal of blasphemy resurrecting from Bethany?

Which Balak sends this Balaam’s foal to mock Messiah?

Where next this din of thieves, this unwashed brood of publicans?

Will they impale the merchants and the bankers and the priests on their hosannas

when they’ve stormed the precincts of the porch?

While their ambitious carpenter withers, as usual, in some forgotten Arimathean sepulchre?”

Berith

  

Bitter herbs, bread unleavened, wine, and lamb slain between the two evenings—

do the twelve comprehend they are settling the last rites of Exodus, sipping the watered dregs of that final Pascha?

And beyond fiction, in the Servant’s holy hands, the betraying heel. And the flat-footed denials. And the splayed doubts. And other such leavenings.

Out of the common dish comes the separating sop to deepen their perplexity.

So there, above some obscure alley in His City, all our wretched story— Eden, Sinai, Golgotha—

is passed over, for His Bread, His Wine, His bitter Tree.

 Later still, such talk under the brooding night! Then prayer, a hymn,

and over the Kidron, into Gethsemane.

Gethsemani

  

What commenced in the other garden begins to end here,

in the shadow of an olive mill by a black brook.

“Behold, We have become like one of them, to bear

their sorrows and their griefs.” Let the wheel break

this Fruit on every tooth and tread. Bruise

the Seed under the trampling heel of the Bull

of Bashan. Pour the sweating barrel

of this agony into the cupping palms of God.

  

“Ecce homo”

“O Galilean, robed in purple, crowned with thorns,

is this Your estate? Is this Your kingship,

reduced to the scourge of their envy and spit? God born

of man, behold Your truth: silver kisses treacherous palms, shape-shifters

rend their costumes at cock-crow, the Pavement is soiled

by the desolation of Your bloody Purity. Look Carpenter,

is Caesar not adored, is Barabbas not preferred?

See, Holy Fool, You and Your Jews, I wash my hands of You!”

Friday

They leave Him nothing but irreducible nakedness—

no fig-leaf girdle, no swaddling cloth, no seamless tunic;

they impale the battered Scarecrow on the Skull’s brow; their final curses

perforate the darkening skin of the sun; His distending knuckles

claw the veil of the God-forsaken air; yet, even now,

He thirsts only for the sour wine at the end of the hyssop branch; stricken

between earth and heaven, His heart opens to a new covenant,

and pours its blood and water on the Father’s reconciling Hands.

Epilogue: Piéta of Joseph of Arimathea

“He was all scattered, empty-limbed, exhausted, gone,

when I gathered Him off the stake. O my Son,

my Son! I was more Your son than You were mine,

Your tentative disciple, peeping out the Council’s shutters for Your Kingdom.

O my wounded King! Holy, Holy, Holy Child! O my dear,bruised Prince!

O Father, receive Him in our poor linen, swathing His torn

flesh. May these paltry spices herald His approach

to Heaven’s Throne. O LORD, give this Your Servant rest in Your eternal Rock.”

II.

Risen Man

i.

“Have you ever shaken hands with a man who was dead?

Have you ever looked into the laughing eyes of a man who beat death?

Have you ever sat next to such a one and shared his salt bread?

Friend, do you know the incomparable odiferousness of the breath

of a resurrected man? Friend, have you been led in Zion’s psalms

by a voice that scattered the doomed wealth

of Satan’s domains?  Stranger, I have known the encompassing arms

of such entombing and embalming Grace.”

ii.

O Lord Christ, that we might,

with hearts' mouths hushed, see You

take the backyard-oven bread

You share with us, see Your hands

raise that plump loaf up into

this day's lavender end,

know with burning, blessed

sight, it's our Master bends

and breaks those dry-crust ends

of breasts of Paix-Bouche bread.

“In Caravaggio’s ikon”

In Caravaggio’s ikon of Thomas seeing Christ
all eyes are locked to the doubter’s firm finger
poking around the torn flesh, under


the strong hand of the Carpenter. Thomas,
Apostle to our secular, mocking, murderous
new age, meeting his worst-case scenario
with the firm grit of flesh under his thumb,
that index of incarnation— incarnation, Immanuel
God is with us — under the impossible rubble,

as we claw at the unimaginable earthfall, Immanuel—
over the body of someone’s son fallen in crossfire,
in shrieking shadowlands of betrayal,

through terminal disorientation of disease, Immanuel.
Because that wound is real, the death was certain,
here, beyond reason, beyond the apocalypse

of private disasters, is something else,
is Life beyond life, beyond heartbreak,
beyond assassination, beyond the tremblor

at 3 in the afternoon, beyond the amnesiac cancer of the mind.
Here, under our finger, is faith, here is hope,
and He asks us, against the brutal heel on the locked door,

the harsh fist of imploding earth,
the shroud covered bier—
“Love one another.”

So, faith is certain

So, faith is certain of tomorrow’s epiphany
but how to meet the apocalyptic moment of now
under fallen colonnades of the Presidential palace

tent cities of cholera and rape and empty-bellied children
the recurring decimation of mud in the kitchen
friends going to dementia, decrepitude and tumours

and in honest mirrors, the apparent dysfunctions,
slipping names, insomnia, gathering pill boxes
and out of reach, envied flirtations with perfect lips,

sloe eyes and teasing hips. Add inescapable
anxieties, dead-end jobs that pay bills,
no prizes, no awards, the country grown strange and foreign,

citizens mocking the devalued currency of art—
so, how to meet the apocalyptic hour
though faith is certain of the promised parousia?

Sketches and Canticles of Lent

© John Robert Lee

Sketches and Canticles of Lent

after Shallon Fadlien

Pierrot – Mardi Gras

Filthy feathers, that painted shoe, trampled headpiece, etcetera

choking drains down the route,

street-light blinking out, stale roti

baddening the guts, your eyes sharp for midnight bandit

or coke jumbie looking to make ole mas

with the unwary  —

                                    you clown prince, you celebratory idiot

you forget she was Coolie Devil original,

Jab-Jab Mistress, maker of scourges?

Socialite – Ash Wednesday

God, to be outta this talk-show bakanal

these infernal cycles of mamaguy kaiso politricks

perpetual, shameless, cell-phone scandals

and all else; man gone cold in Toronto

landlord looking for his portion,

me sleeping with my fantasies —

in the penitential procession

the priest and his boys washing

you, beloved masquerader, in their platter of ashes.

Masque – Good Friday

We know the triumphant end of that old scenario:

disembowelled shroud, vacant catacomb

incredible gossip of love-struck women

whose eyes and hands and arms

encompassed the impossible incarnate eternal,

the risen God —

                                    the empty mask, inanimate

signature of death’s humanity

crosses to centre stage before that tremendous denouement.

© Art: Masque by Shallon Fadlien

Poem in Pierrot. Peepal Tree, 2020.

I am pleased to let you know that Peepal Tree Press, my publisher, is announcing the publication of my new poetry collection, Pierrot, on February 20th.

It is my third book with Peepal. (In 2019, Polly Pattullo of Papillote Press published my Saint Lucian writers and writing: an Author Index. I have published several chapbooks and books of my own under my Saint Lucian imprint Mahanaim Publishing.)

Thanks to my editor and publisher Jeremy Poynting and his hard working manager Hannah Bannister. The cover art is by Saint Lucian artist Shallon Fadlien who lives in Canada.

The write-up below is from the Peepal Tree web site and its section on upcoming books. Congratulations and all the best to my fellow Peepal writers with new books on the way.

And we continue to send congratulations and best wishes to Roger Robinson, Tdad/UK who won the prestigious T S Eliot Prize for his A Portable Paradise, published by Peepal. Continuing thanks also to Bocas LitFest, Calabash, Nehesi Publishers and the St. Martin Book fair and others at home and in our diaspora who make space and opportunity for writers to present their work through readings and book fairs. The NGC-Bocas annual awards are now among the most anticipated at home and abroad.

And thanks again to Peepal Tree and the hardworking folks there who since 1985 have been the foremost publishers of Caribbean and Black British literature. Amazing range of poetry, prose fiction and non-fiction if you look close. So many of Peepal's writers are now recognized names all over the literary world.

We press on

jrl

From Peepal tree web site:

"The sacred and the profane, dialogues with self and world, literature and politics meet in the figure of Pierrot. He is the sad clown, holy fool of literary tradition, the suffering artist who connects to Christ in his most human incarnation as Man of Sorrows, and he is also the Pierrot Grenade of Caribbean carnival, the most literary of carnival figures who can spell anything, who carries a whip, but lashes with his tongue. The two meet so that Pierrot is both the bedraggled figure at the sordid end of carnival who is weary of the “Infernal cycles of mamaguy kaiso politricks”, and the risen Christ who, if you listen, you can hear “crack His midnight robber word”.

In his ninth collection of poems, John Robert Lee contemplates his 70th year in St Lucia and the sad chimes of mortality as friends and literary and cultural heroes leave this life. It’s a time for a weighing up of where domestic, political, literary and spiritual journeys have reached. It is a time of both honest admissions but also renewed faith in all these journeys. 

If any of this suggests a retired poetry steeped in reflective sorrow, far from it. This is the most vigorous, demotic and experimental of John Robert Lee’s collections. There are new explorations of poetic forms such as the glosa, homages to the poetry of writers from Dionne Brand to Francis Thompson, the literary equivalent of the ekphrastic poems that have been appearing in his recent work. Pierrot is probably the most intimate of Lee’s collections, more of the man in all his guises appears here, a confessional voice lightened by self-irony and humour. Sometimes Pierrot is an archetypal figure, sometimes he may be thought to be Lee himself. And if salvation is the ultimate prize, few have beaten down the Babylon of the great northern neighbour with a heavier, more righteous lash than Lee wields in his poem, “Who made me a stranger in this world”."