Poetry No 1: Re-discovered
I am busy removing old files from my computer. Most of them are in a folder carrying the vaguely general title of ‘Church’ with numerous subfolders such as ‘Parish Council’, ‘Liturgy’ and ‘Sermons’. Do I really need to keep all the sermons I’ve preached since 2010? (That was the last time my hard drive crashed and I had not backed-up such items as sermons.) ‘Maybe… You never know, I might be asked to preach on the 27th Sunday after Pentecost and I could simply lift the sermon I preached in 2011 and use that.’ But reading through such ancient old sermons you realise that most sermons are definitely time-bound. What was happening in 2011 is not the same as what is happening in 2020 or 2021. I say that as a historian and it is us historians who constantly say that history repeats itself!
I remember as a server at St Margaret’s, Fish Hoek in the early 1960, I was the only server willing to serve on the third Sunday of the month when retired Bishop Basil Peacey used to be the celebrant and preacher. I loved serving for him at the Eucharist because he was so High Church Anglo-Catholic. Genuflecting at what I now know through Ritual Notes1 to be the right places, saying the Last Gospel (genuflecting at the words ‘made flesh and dwelt among us’, of course!), doing the preparation from a printed card which included a confession and the saying the antiphon I will go unto the altar of God : even unto the God of my joy and gladness. Oh, it was so exciting and colourful and rebellious among the rather staid broad-church congregation of St Margaret’s then! I must admit that his sermons were long and hard to follow because he spoke in such the strange modulating tone of a very old man. I wonder how old he was? He was made a deacon in 1913 and let us say he was 25y old then that would make him born 1888. In 1966 he would be about 78y! During the Preparation he was so hard to follow as we servers knelt on either side of him. Fortunately, we only had to say something after he had beaten his chest at the confession so we could catch up at that point. One Sunday after the service, as I was clearing away the sacred vessels and setting up the tray for the next Eucharist on Tuesday morning, Bishop Peacey was disrobing and he took his sermon notes and tore them up and threw them into the wastepaper bin. “This is where most sermons belong” he said smiling at me as he did it.
While talking about Bishop Peacey, I feel should mention two other things. The first is personal and occurred when I was in Std 8 (now Grade 10). I was sixteen years old. He said to me. ‘Young man, have you ever thought about becoming a priest?’ I was at that time into the Anglo-Catholic novels of authors such as Ernest Raymond (Tell England, My Brother’s Keeper etc.) and Compton Mackenzie (Altar Steps) and I had thought how wonderful it could be if I could become a priest and celebrate the Communion as Bishop Peacey did, with bells and smells and all the ceremony and the choir singing the setting by John Merbecke. I feel that I had reached heaven! So, I answered, ‘Yes’. ‘How is your school work,’ the Bishop asked me. I told him my not-so-good marks. He responded, ‘If you want to become a priest you will have to work much harder!’ I cannot say that his comment put me off and it certainly wasn’t what cause delay of any further exploration of my vocation for some twenty-four years, but that is another story. I greatly admired Bishop Peacey and it was only later while doing Church History through university in the 1990s that I read Alan Paton’s book on Archbishop Geoffrey Clayton2 which speaks of Bishop Peacey’s strong pro-Apartheid views. R. R. Langham-Carter, in his booklet on the history of the Parish of Christ Church, Constantia3 speaks of Bishop Peacey being rector there from 1941. His wife was pro-German and he would not allow prayers to be said for those away serving in the Allied forces. He also believed that the Constantia parish was a ‘Coloured’ parish and he asked the white parishioners to go elsewhere, though not all followed his request. By the time I knew Bishop Peacey, some 25 years later, I saw none of this nor knew about it until my reading came across it, well after he had died.
I have drifted off the reason for writing this blog-essay. So back to me clearing my computer hard drive. As I was wiping off unwanted files and folders from my hard drive I came across a folder called ‘Poems’. I re-read the poems I wrote in the 1990s, especially those I wrote while at the College of Transfiguration and the year immediately after it. It is strange to re-read about how one felt twenty-five years previous. I kept on thinking: “Did I write that! It’s too good! Wow!” or “It’s too bad! Let me destroy it!” Most of these poems were captured in my Spiritual Journal and then typed out on my PC. But why did this poetry writing stop in 1996?
I was thinking about this the other night when I woke up in the middle of the night. I came up with a reason but I think there are a multitude of reasons and perhaps this is the simplest and least threatening to me. My life as a Medical Laboratory Technologist had become routine. Oh, yes, exciting things were happening – birth of Nick and Kate being the most important but then my decision to allow myself to hear what God was saying to me about my vocation to serve God as a priest and then the church’s acceptance of that call, put me into a transitional zone, a liminal space. Into this space I started writing poems that expressed my feeling and emotions at that time, responding to things that were happening around me. The first batch of poems disappeared in some hard-drive crash or other but once at College where my time was no longer routine like going to the laboratory to work and coming home again, but rather ordered in a very monastic-type of way, allowing me time to think and write, which I had to do as I was doing BTh(hons) at Rhodes University and had to produce an essay a week. This liminal space within continued into my deacon year and up to my ordination as a priest. Then my poetry writing ceased. I think what happened is that I was now back into a regular routine of sermon-writing, visiting, chairing parish meetings etc. I was comfortable with it and so the discomfort of my liminal space disappeared.
Going through later spiritual journals I find plenty of recorded quotation that moved me, plenty of entries at the start of a retreat saying it would be great if I could be inspired to write a poem again. But very few if any poems appear.
Now, at this time, the routine of running a parish has been removed from me and so I’m sitting down and writing again. Not sermons, nor poetry, but essay-type scripts expressing my feelings and emotions in prose rather than poetry. The academic writing of my Master’s thesis (completed in 1997) and the editorship of the Cape Town Family History Society’s Newsletter (since 2010) has perhaps resulted in me approaching writing in a more ‘academic’ way, ensuring that all quotes and references are duly foot-noted. Not conducive to the writing of verse!
I said above that as I looked at some of my poems I thought, ‘This is much too good for me to have written, surely it is a quote from someone else.” I’m not saying the poems are brilliant but maybe someone else might be moved by them so I’m going to place on this blog every so often a poem from my collection which I think you, the reader, might enjoy. I will title these blog entries as “Poem No. xx” and beside giving the verse I might need to set the context in which it was written and I’ll place in the blog entry too.
Let me give you a taster.
These lines were written during a Saturday Quiet Day, during the time we were sent away to meditate
In the College Garden on a Quiet Day
The sound drifts up from the valley below,
The rustle of trees, doors being opened and closed,
The ‘sprong’ of well-struck tennis-balls,
The laughter of sportsmen preparing for their match,
And above, through and gently over these….
The sound of a meandering flute being practised
somewhere in the stillness below.
[4 June 1994]
I remembered this poem some twenty years later when I joined a group of Cape Town Clergy to lecture at COTT for a week.
Then and Now
Twenty years ago,
on a Saturday afternoon,
the sound of a flautist practising
came drifting up towards the college.
It was a quiet day,
and I was wandering in the garden.
The sound touched my inner being,
forcing me to capture the moment in verse.
Tonight, staying in nearby staff accommodation
I hear the sound of marimbas practising.
It drifts up a block and a half
yet takes me back twenty years.
By tomorrow I’ll be home,
but those around me will still be here
in their same positions in the Chapel.
Silent in meditation.
It is just like it was twenty years ago,
all that has changed are the faces.
[2014. Grahamstown]
- E. C. R. Lamburn. Ritual Notes (London: W Knott & Son Limited, 1964 [↩]
- Alan Paton, Apartheid and the Archbishop: the life and times of Geoffrey Clayton. (Cape Town: David Philip, 1983) [↩]
- R. R. Langham Carter, Among the vineyards: the story of Christ Church, Constantia (Constantia: Christ Church Parish, no date) [↩]
