After Poems, Psalms E-Book

John Robert Lee

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 44

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In his fifth collection with Peepal Tree Press, After Poems, Psalms, John Robert Lee achieves a sense of spirit, insight and empathy with these celebratory and contemplative poems. "In the way that we might look to the psalms for strength and solace, After Poems, Psalms should be received as a gift, a balm and a cause for celebration. Here is a companion to assist spirit wrestlers and lovers of poetry in their quest to identify the numinous in both the human and the natural worlds. " Lorna Goodison

Leseprobe

JOHN ROBERT LEE

AFTER POEMS, PSALMS

GLOSAS

“Flute”. Ken ‘Scotty’ Lawrence.

CONTENTS

I: Prologue: Inexorably, irrevocably, I draw near the High Place –

II: Try for another angle in the confessional,

III: The BBC man intoned with Big Ben tolling,

IV: We live here, however the life is,

V: The monotonous heavy sound of persistent rain,

VI: We call holy convocations for the feasts of months,

VII: After poems, psalms. And sacred canticles

VIII: But how to render psalms into a profane world

IX: The sound-track of our chronicles

X: How quickly go days now, falling

XI: Is it possible that the barrage of noise and images

XII: And then the sacred vacancy

XIII: In this contentious, contested post-truth world,

XIV: The Apocalypse of John may be phantasmagoric,

XV: You must now enter the silence alone and listen. Wait.

XVI: October is getting cooler under the breadfruit trees,

XVII: It’s not that death is not a familiar

XVIII: I like Japanese wood-block prints,

XIX: I often wonder whether the prodigal son

XX: Epilogue: After poems, psalms. And canticles of island pilgrims

Author’s Note

ForThe Psalmist

Writers and artists of faith in the sacred and sacramental

In MemoriamEdward Baugh, Jamaican scholar and poet, 1936 - 2023 Funso Aiyejina, Nigerian/Trinidadian poet and scholar, 1949 – 2024 Irvin Desir, Saint Lucian poet, 1954 - 2024Velma Pollard, Jamaican writer and scholar, 1937 - 2025 Hazel Simmons-McDonald, St Lucian scholar and writer, 1947-2025

After poems, psalms. And canticles of island pilgrims passing through self-important harbours, smoke-blue banana valleys, villages lounging at the curves of bougainvillea lanes.” – J. R. Lee (Canticles)

“…without participation in God, there can be no escaping fragmentation, disintegration, self-alienation, however much we may struggle against them…..only when his art possesses a sacred quality will it present a positive challenge to our technological world and to the degradation of human life which is endemic to it…the task of the artist – of the sacred artist – is to reveal to us and to itself, the true nature of a world that we have allowed ourselves to regard as non-sacred, non-sacramental, merely neutral, if not simply dead or soulless matter;” – Philip Sherrard (The Sacred in Life and Art).

“…The worldis a holy vision, had we clarity to see it – a clarity that men depend on men to make.” – Wendell Berry (Collected Poems)

I – PROLOGUE

Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God do not forsake me,

Until I declare Your strength to this generation,

Your power to everyone who is to come. – Psalm 71:18

1.

Inexorably, irrevocably, I draw near the High Place – bamboo-fluting of wood doves, coconut palms shuttling the breeze,

Morne Gimie wreathed with overcast evening, woodsmoke dissolving its plumes over Garrand, anonymous traffic of voices, music, cars outside on the road,

and news of another passing lingers with intermittent drizzle, end-of-day gospelling blackbirds –

Now also when I am old and greyheaded,

2.

still wanting that blood-warmth of affectionate arms, those soft eyes of caring desire,

lovingkind words which affirm

yes, certainties of covenant secure against streetsmart chatter of infidelities, mundane idolatries,

insidious seductions of cyberspace we finger to distraction, shutting our hearts away in virtual isolation with selfies –

O God do not forsake me,

3.

when names dodge familiar faces, anxieties trouble sleep and speech, when we collapse in once firm and potent places,

when dollars never meet estimated ends, and LORD, when newly-fashioned plantocrats turn these hapless island-nations to big-boat destinations,

and the people jam streets with pagan noise, vote their birthrights to corrupt parliaments – LORD, extend Your mercy to the young ones

Until I declare Your strength to this generation,

4.

with my horn of words that sound true, muted with love from blasted blaring, scaling the beauty of the blue

and other notes, measuring solo lines with faith, bridging our earth to Your great and Holy Kingdom,

weaving chords of canticles to birth light again, counterpoint dark again, to raise Your praise, to unveil again Your High Home,

Your power to everyone who is to come.

II

He shall be like a tree

Planted by the rivers of water,

That brings forth its fruit in its season, Whose leaf also shall not wither; – Psalm 1: 3

1.

Try for another angle in the confessional, a different look at the private, the collective, of days darting like birds’ shadows

at eyes’ corners, under slowing reflexes,

over the impossible obituaries,

aspiring autocrats and their absurdities –

you don’t want to repeat yourself, to sketch worn images again, to wallow in self-righteous pity, forgetting

He shall be like a tree

2.

not a pigeon-encrusted monument to be pulled down from its base of lies, not other related shifty-eyed impotencies –

so you must enter the aloneness

of honesties, consort with shifting fictions

of memory, desire again ghosts that haunt

passages of your flesh and sly mind,

find, if you can, where you lost, or found, your way, to know who caught you up with quiet laughter, and

Planted by the rivers of water,

3.

hiding baffled tears under cold gazes,

still too innocent, naïve about circling motives,

raise what you know, the truth of things in this galaxy,