On the fourth Sunday of April 2023, we’ve been granted the opportunity to write a poem composed of numbered sections. Each section was to be in dialogue with the others, like a song where a different person sings each verse, giving a different point of view.

Additionally, the setting was to be specific, ideally a place where we once spent much time, but no longer do.

I used parts of The Age of Anxiety: A baroque Eclogue by W. H. Auden for methodological examples and guidance. Auden used several techniques in his book-length poem. One was identity tags (“Emble was thinking, Now Rosetta says, Malin says” … or sings, or Auden simply names the character) for who was speaking or thinking. He also explained places or set moods in prose. However, he did not use numbered sections. I must (mine is not to reason why). I have spared us both the book’s advantage of a 49-page introduction.

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The Masque of Nave
(“’oh, heaven help me’ she prayed, to be decorative and to do right.” R. Firbank, The Flower beneath the Foot)

1. 1. 1. He recalled to me…

I sat, stood, and kneeled in the back-most pew
of the bright, modern, incensed church nave.
Why was I there? What did I want?

1. 1. 2. Jack later said…

I don’t believe all this makes sense, celibacy
without a cause, trans faces reality, real versus
what you think this place can do for you.

1. 1. 3. Elle complained…

Not a wretch am I, and exactly from what
do any of us need savin’? They will come
if you feed them, and the music isn’t too bad.

1. 1. 4. Adam looked and talked…

I could live like this, with some of you.
Hungry for your touch. I can show you
the way to find heaven on earth, in church.

1. 1. 5. Then Ted said…

I will let you, if you allow me. We need
secrets to keep. This place smells, but
however it is, let me be part of it.

1. 1. 6. Maddie told us…

Ted and Adam can play their sick game
without us in hell to help them; they are
blind and will never see time go so slow.

1. 1. 7. I recalled…

This is not the place for us above it all.
No one will find a way or feel the fall.
What matters most is how we lived.

1. 1. 8. And Jack repeated…

What you sense is not the house of God,
but the way to be seen as safe or good,
none here will go farther than the end.

1. 1. 9. And I said to Jack and Judy…

Ted and Adam are alone and now dead;
you’ll both soon go to join them there;
the end patiently waits. But it always comes.

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Look both ways into the good and the evil.
Even the snake only wants to be left alone.
Mind the gaps in all relationships.
People worships for reasons unknown,
often even to them.

 

Note: I did not use Roman numerals. WP did that on its own when I indented the poem. But they work okay, right?