Geoff Page: Two Poems

Bishop Joseph Hall of Norwich

Bishop Joseph Hall of Norwich,

satirist and true divine,

loved the via media.

I count him as a friend of mine

despite the sharp four hundred years

between his fractious times and ours.

He cautioned both the Church of Rome

and Puritans who seized the powers

conceded by the headless Charles.

“Lord what a clattering of glass,”

he smiled as they pruned back his church.

“What wrestling down of iron and brass!”

Not short of an opinion but

a sturdy foe of all excess,

Bishop Hall survives in Wiki;

gets ten pages, more or less.

“God loveth adverbs,” Hall believed

and argued God “cares not how good”

but much prefers to note “how well”.

A point that’s still misunderstood.

                                  Geoff Page

______________________

A Field of Horses

Finally, I’ve looked it up,

that strange word hippocampus.

Far down in the brain,

it’s in there firmly fixed between

the frontal and occipital,

forming and then laying down

our memory of events,

blessing us with spatial sense,

both of which begin to waver,

tellingly, upon dementia’s

setting in at last.

My taste for etymology

has hitherto supplied me with

hippo (horse) and campus (field),

ergo, “field of horses”,

all those trailing tails and manes.

Now it seems my hippo’s right;

my kampos, sadly, proves to be

Greek for “monster of the sea”,

a seahorse, if you will—though somewhat

small as monsters go.

Their similarity is close,

the seahorse and the hippocampus,

each of them akin to knights

prancing out on black and white.

“Seahorse monster of the deep”?

Surely “field of horses”

has the wilder ring?

I have no doubt when death breaks in

I’ll hear a final rush of hooves

gallop through my brain.

                   Geoff Page