The Conspiracy

It seemed we were cornered, a cosmic conspiracy,

Our life and our longing aligned against us

With the dread of death, our desire for justice

And the friend who forgives, forgives all

Though understanding everything, each other’s tearing,

Our mood and our might mocked by our ending.

“We did not beg birth, bawling at heaven,

Nor the debt we bear, desire buying

Fractured fulfilment, and at last futility.

We are numb in our need, knowing it unmet

And to ache forever. Oh that you had made us

As the unperceiving stones, unfeeling sea,

The semblance in the stars of freezing serenity.”

Thus we acted the innocent.

    Until the ringleader

(As we dared say) defected to our side,

Assumed mortality like man that is made.

He sustained the weary, stole the sting

From grief’s wounds with a gentle word.

Peace and healing were his practice,

Rage too at wrong that wrecks us.

Vain then and unvalued was our show of virtue,

Our Babel laid bare to his brightness.

Wan then the welcome to light that enlightens.

We cursed him and crushed him, hurried him to his cross,

There taught him tortures unimagined by innocence.

Yet he pleaded our pardon in his fierce passion.

Warring on our wickedness, he dragged it to death,

Laid it in the lees of hell at his release.

Yet his death was reckoned as writing off our debt:

We cannot claim clean hands, pure hearts,

Except by the sign of our sin against Christ.

To baulk at his blood is guilt against us.

Insisting on innocence implicates in his murder…

Rightly could he laugh at our lacrimae rerum.

Our pose is proven, we are found out.

Yet he considers the chief hurt of his cross:

Forsaken. He would spare us confusion…

Technical Note: those who are familiar with Anglo-Saxon poems will recognise this as a poor imitation. Their writers did not use rhyme and metre as many poets since Chaucer have done. By and large they wrote in lines that would have four stressed syllables, of which three would alliterate - "Round the Rugged Rocks..."

Well, the language has changed a great deal since the Norman Conquest with its accompanying French- and Latin-isms. I've found it really hard to keep all the Anglo-Saxon rules so I've slipped in a few extra ones of my own. Where a stressed syllable begins with a vowel I've let others begin with any vowel - tut-tut. I've allowed myself to use two different alliterations in the same line - Wan then the welcome to light that enlightens, or in another pattern, Rightly could he laugh at our lacrimae rerum. Sometimes though I've failed even to live by my own rules - Oh dear... I get some encouragement from post conquest writers such as Langland, in his epic Piers Plowman, who clearly used a more relaxed and baggier form because of the evolution of the English language.

What I hope to have retained from the Anglo-Saxons is a propulsive energy, a terse contemplation of struggle, and an understated quality: Wan then the welcome... In spiritual terms, I'm seeking an understanding of Jesus, not as passive victim but as a warrior who, like Beowulf, goes into battle on behalf of His people. However much I fall below it, the model I aspire to is The Dream of the Rood.