1
After its death the single human soul
Continues living in another life;
I knew that personally, but I was special,
For, in my age it was a rare belief.
Men were too proud to believe they’d go to hell,
Yet made their way there as I did. In brief:
I saw what John’s Apocalypse described
And what comes later on when you have died.
2
In exile in my own time and my country
I only had my work van and my thoughts.
I did not play a part in World War Three
Being not important nor of many parts
(A shyness more than a humility).
Not learned at prayer nor such recondite arts,
Preoccupied, distracted at the end,
I was not concentrated in that wasteland.
3
Now when the bomb fell miles away at Crewe
And made the ground swell like a ringing bell
At Gresford, where I was, at my employ,
My hour had come, and the hour of London’s Whitehall -
Now there had been a putsch there years ago
By men who were to blame for what befell,
Who did not know the basic rules of life
And played with fire and madness. But enough.
4
I’ll tell you what I saw, and with my lips
I’ll say what I have learned, talking with ghosts.
The last thing that I saw is this, perhaps:
A series of explosive missile blasts.
They knocked me down and knocked out all my hopes.
But shortly after that, controlled air bursts
Were over Liverpool and Merseyside;
That was the moment when my body died.
5
Some metals in the earth can radiate.
They’re big and complex and they fall apart
Atomically, if you agitate
Or fire more atoms at them. Then they start
To mutually spark and split and split;
And nuclear energies, which were inert,
Release their objects and spread out at speed,
And that was the great force which made me dead.
6
Electric forces work up into storms,
To heat the copper wires in someone’s home.
Computers smoke, fire breaks out and consumes.
The air and sky heat up and turn to flame.
People are knocked about by wind and fumes.
The land is charred and hot until the time
When night sets in and dust obscures the sun,
And if you live you don’t see it again.
7
That’s what I have been told. But I recall
Nothing of this, oblivious on my back.
When I got up, I should have been unwell,
But I looked toward my van, my tools, and work.
I had been labouring by the Gresford chapel;
My customer had died in the attack.
The lime trees leading to the church doors burned:
I’ll tell you why, as far as I’m concerned.
8
The supercilious men of my own nation
Conceived of no legitimate constraint
On their ambition to make the world one.
Another nation’s sovereign parliament
Preferred to fight than undergo submission.
The other details are of no account.
I’d been a soldier, that’s how I grew up,
Unrepresented by them since their coup.
9
And while the trees burned and the bodies stank,
I felt resentment for how things had been;
Denied a purpose or a place of rank,
A stranger in my own time and my nation.
Just as a youth, when dying, starts to think
About his mum, so, I being old, my son
And daughter recollected, who had lived
Apart from me. Had those I loved survived?
10
That day the ways to home would be replete
With wreckage, bodies, fires and general chaos,
So I, who never left work incomplete
Continued, while reflecting on my case.
I thought about my country and its fight -
Considerations now mere idleness.
Meanwhile, another missile hit the ground;
A bright light like a rainbow spread around.
11
I set my tools down. Thinking of my wife,
My mind made up to prosper. I should go;
I’d steal the kids back; take them somewhere safe.
But as the ash fell down like dirty snow
A man came walking through the burning chafe
Which lit the ground, and made an feeble glow.
This living man was wearing work man’s clothes
I saw him breathing as he took deep breaths.
12
His knees were bandaged like they used to use
When mining, and his hands were big and wide:
A hard man who engulfed me in his gaze
From out the darkness. He said this, he did:
“The time for action’s over now, these days
Are finished. Everyone one you knew is dead,
And all of them you didn’t understand
Or know, are lying waiting underground.
13
“Your wife has asked me, and so it will be,
That you can join her and the ones you lost
Though they’re sequestered far from this decay.
Now follow me.” He spoke with language tossed
Across a distance, so it seemed to me.
The nuclear mushroom clouds dissolved to mist,
While he stood close in front of them and stepped
Amidst the red hot ashes. Me, I wept.
14
“Don’t think you had no part in this event;
You’ve been a soldier; but we’ll let that pass.
For, doing bad things with a good intent
Is how it was ordained to be for us.
But think no more about what history meant
And loyalties to country or to class.
We’ll make our way now on a pilgrimage
Which human souls must make from every age.”
1
Just as a man who works through day and night,
And when the day breaks carries on his working,
Indifferent to sleep but resolute
To finish engineering what he’s making,
Will start to see things and hallucinate,
So I was, since my consciousness was broken.
“Who are you? Where from? Tell me where we are.
It’s like I’m drunk or someone spiked my beer.”
2
Such my delirious words to him. Meanwhile
He gave no answer. In the gloomy light
Which fires threw on our walking mile to mile
I saw the towers of Wrexham up ahead,
The parish church in that late gothic style.
Mansions and houses stood around, complete,
As if the bombs had never knocked them down:
These things had sprung back up to form the town.
3
Red chimneys still reached out into the sky
And there were terraced houses under them,
And fancy pipeworks of small industry,
Above dead bodies which had found their home,
And lay unhappily, along our way.
In Nineteen Eighteen, to Jerusalem,
Came TE Lawrence, liberating it,
My leader seemed to me to look like that;
4
Calmly he walked, as if he did not care
And scruffily as if despite being lazy,
By accident he won that holy war.
Just so, my leader seemed to find it easy
To see the bodies strewn across the floor
And evidence the dead were going crazy
And had arisen from their holes and graves,
While buildings rose and fell like ocean waves.
5
“Here space is time, so as we saunter forward
Time backward moves, and when we halt time stops.
As I created Being with my word
So now, I draw it back into collapse.
But slowly, retrograde. It is too hard
To take the world from you except in steps.
All of creation is reversing now
For you. Behold, I’m making all things new.”
6
So he, and I replied: “So now, I realise.
I am not here. Back there I surely died.
And this, my country, come back in reprise
With living corpses rising from the mud,
Is just as finished as imperial Greece
When Athens ruled, or Venice in its stead.
And you, I know who you are now, the Lord.
I’m not consoled, though, I am not consoled.”
7
“I am not happy. I don’t understand
Why I have lived to see cosmic destruction,
Why I have been saved from the final end
And why the flow of time which should press on
Is being mangled up by your own hand.
What will you do with me? In my own fashion
I would prefer to die.” I spoke. My knees
Felt weak; we went exploring through the trees.
8
The structure of our age was in retreat,
The human things were disappearing fast
And natural things were making them vacate.
And at the place where there had used to rest
The Wrexham cenotaph, nothing of note,
Just tangled bush and native oak tree forest.
“You want to hide yourself, or to escape
Like somebody who does not want to cope?
9
“Let me communicate what’s going on.
We’re going to make our way outside all things.
A stubborn man like you, a common man,
You’ve failed to follow me where I left inklings.
You had your own will. Your life was your own.
When you were called by me to face your sins,
So thick and heavy, and you had no faith,
You went your own way, ‘til you welcomed death.
10
“You had no hope in future life with me.
You would not trust me talking to your heart.
And worst, you were hard as machinery
And took the opportunity to hurt
When it had been a time for charity.
And now, when I dispose of every part
Of this created world and throw aside
What does not know me, you’d be left for dead?
11
“Watch as that streak of light moves west to east;
That is the sun cycling around the globe.
I make it move like that, now slow, now fast.
It’s nothing to me now whether it move
One way or other; but into the past
I’m taking you, and not from any love
Which you’ve experienced or understood.
Love, image of our Father and the one God.”
12
I will not tell you how I felt that time,
Or how previsions filled me with despair
When he said this, but still I lacked the shame
To shy from asking: “Why then are you here?
Have you determined to ignore my crime?”
“You have two children, they have made a prayer.
I know to whom, but you are not familiar
With who she is. For them I came for you.
13
“The children prayed my mother when you died,
And she petitioned me to take you on.”
We trod the silent earth all waste and void
A dark land now, where my birth place had been
I was ashamed to do so in my pride
But touched his coat in secret like the woman
Accursed with bleeding. “Don’t be too dejected.
Attend to what I say. You’ll be protected.”
1
Here are the dead, they move about the streets
And not skeletal, putrefied or shadow,
But rising fully living from their pits.
Not torn like snails of unformed escargot,
Smelling of earth and hot from special plates;
But as I was, and as you would be, too,
If you were there: with body and with spirit,
As pure as gold unmixed and of high karat.
2
By my wrist watch, I had been dead for hours,
But by my reckoning it was the time
Before men started noticing the years;
The world had changed, but the people stayed the same.
I asked my rescue. I: “The universe
Has stopped and like the pieces of a game
The parts are being put back in their box.
So how do souls still thrive despite these freaks?”
3
And he: “My father sees what is, has been,
Will be; a simultaneous event.
Though man’s mind can be God’s, and God be man,
Yet few of them renounced their keen attachment
Entirely and in high dispassion
Renounced the body for a single moment
To join with Him; today the great world scroll
Is rolled up throwing out these foolish people.
4
“Death and rebirth and body and discomfort,
The stage and drama made laboriously
And now demolished, were all made with effort
So that you could be loved, and come to me.
And now you come.” Those were the words he offered.
But I, more anxious still than previously,
Said: “Sir, I mean, without the earth and sky
How can we live, my family and me?
5
“You told me I would see them, come the time.
How can we live, though?” Even then the cold
And uninhabited and roofless home,
That world, was not the place to be a child.
“I can do anything; so, I could seem,”
He answered me, “to devastate the world,
Decapitate, consume it, all at once
Or make it real again for little ones.”
6
I now regret and then I did regret
The questions asked, the doubts that I expressed.
But had you been there, what would you have said?
To be alive while all the earth collapsed
Made me so sad, I was not thinking straight.
“I’m sorry,” I said. He said: “What comes first
Is travelling across this ruined land.
Let’s go. When you have seen you’ll understand.”
7
We went, and where once flowed the river Gwenfro,
A little river some might call a brook,
Which flowed past trollies, bushes, thin and shallow,
There was a dull noise as the land fell back
Before a massive flood all black and yellow
Without the signs of slimy orange rock
That I had seen there when I was a child,
But deep and vast and awful to behold.
8
There was another noise almost as loud
Behind the falling rain, raindrops and dust
Which layer over layer made a cloud
For raindrop seeding, rain the hue of rust;
I heard them, people gathered, who instead
Of towns and jobs were into mobs compressed.
So like a flock of sheep on a hillside
They gathered wailing by the river wide.
9
It’s painful to relive the memory
And I’m reluctant to recall and write.
A car park is a large flat territory,
And if you packed it full with people tight,
And figured with your mental imagery
A hundred more of these, that might be fit
To show you all the ghostly men and women
Assembled at the river on that plain.
10
So abject and so undistracted there,
I sorrowed such I seemed to lose my mind;
Those naked psyches and those bodies bare!
My master led me forward through that band.
While many in the crowd stayed where they were,
Others were trying to escape the gloomy strand.
There was a leader too, I saw his shape
Which seemed to me to dominate the mob.
11
He was no demon or terrific beast
Corralling souls toward the river crossing,
It was a man whose face I recognised.
With him stood there, I thought something was missing,
To my view of him, being catechised
By Dante: since by Dante’s sublime lesson,
We learn who rules in Hell and rules in Limbo;
In his book mythic creatures rule below.
12
To children, teachers oftentimes provide
Stories to bring along their education:
Explorers, soldiers, things that invocate
An ideal for the child’s own imitation.
Now David Livingstone was what they taught,
When I was young and got my first instruction.
That solitary self-made white explorer
Who went to Christianise all Africa.
13
An evangelist of God in a foreign land
Who famously went up the river Nile.
I recognised him, he was in command
Shouting: “Awake, wake up, you slept a while.
Did you imagine death could be the end?
Half of you gave up faith in God until
Death was a nothing, sort of an escape!
But you’re awake, so get aboard this ship.
14
“We’ll sail to more life. Come here. Anyone
Who cares about his self can pass this point.
If you’re responsible for what you’ve done
And like the idea of showing what you’ve learned
In life, come here, get on, get on, get on!”
Some moved to him, but many others turned.
Although I tried to go to him and talk,
My master held me back, “Just let him work.
15
“He’s rooting out that wretched bunch of souls
Who weigh more than a feather in the scales;
After today, they will not have a pulse.”
I don’t intend to fabricate tall tales;
This really happened, this is true not false:
He saw me, saying: “Apostle of Wales!”
He ran toward me, offering to embrace,
And did so, then returned back to his duties.
-----