Lay for the Day 27th
December
The
feast of St John the Evangelist. The author of the fourth Gospel is, according
to tradition, the beloved disciple who leant on Jesuss
breast at the Last Supper, and the author of the Revelation that ends
the Christian Bible.
The
final incident in his Gospel provides the poems title.
Fish for Breakfast
Its been going slowly
wrong now for a long time,
Spiked with sudden disasters.
Remember the flood? Remember the wind?
Remember the ship and the drunken master?
Its been twisting round
somebodys little pinky
Till every words bent out of sense.
Find me one with a decent point left
To hang a house together, let alone fix the rent.
The meadows black and
yellow like last years paper.
Cluck, clack the bells been rung.
Everybodys talking about the weather
And the leaves all summer like unwell tongues.
If God were alive hed
be turning in his grave now
To hear the captains praise him.
The saints are sleeping quiet in the light.
Well never blow our horns enough to raise them.
Mocked and saluted and run
up a pole,
Hes been hounded from pillar to post,
Hung out to dry and crammed back in the hole again
No ghost, eating fish for breakfast on the shore.
The
Lay Reader: an archive of the poetic calendar
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