Cathedral Service

I’m only here because I wandered in
Not knowing that a service would begin,
And had to slide into the nearest pew,
Pretending it was what I’d meant to do.

The tall candles cast their frail light
Upon the priest, the choir clad in white,
The carved and polished and embroidered scene,
The congregation numbers seventeen.

And awkwardly I follow as I’m led
To kneel or stand or sing or bow my head.
Though these specific rites are strange to me,
I know their larger meaning perfectly—

The heritage of twenty centuries
Is symbolised in rituals like these,
In special modes of beauty and of grace
Enacted in a certain kind of place.

This faith, although I lack it, is my own,
Inherent to the marrow of the bone.
To this even the unbelieving mind
Submits its unbelief to be defined.

Perhaps the meagre congregation shows
How all of that is drawing to a close,
And remnants only come here to entreat
These dying flickers of the obsolete.

Yet when did this religion ever rest
On weight of numbers as the final test?
Its founder said that it was all the same
When two or three were gathered in his name.

© Peter Kocan

The Social Workers

Hyenas will encourage a stampede
To see which ailing zebra falls behind.
They’re nature’s social workers, and inclined
To feel most altruistic when they feed.

© Peter Kocan

Them and Us

And still the elites betray us every day,
Despite the fact that they need hardly bother,
For they’ve discovered many an easy way
Of prompting us to betray each other.

© Peter Kocan

Dylan & Caitlin

The poignant photograph is one
Of them reclining in the sun —
Their intimacy showing through,
Unposed, unglamorous, but true.

Yet with a tension in it all,
As if they had agreed to call
This little truce in passion’s war
Beside the heron-priested shore.

Forever, as the moments pass,
Their shadows rest upon the grass.
These two remain forever caught
In pensive attitudes of thought.

And just before the camera’s blink
She might’ve said, “How strange to think
Our pictured selves will never know
What happens when we rise and go.”

“They’ll seem to know,” he might’ve said,
“For everything that lies ahead
Will cast its retrospective ray
Upon these phantoms of today.”

— Bereft of colour, motion, sound,
Their world is burgeoning around,
The teeming year of Fifty-Three
Whose end he wouldn’t live to see.

© Peter Kocan