Geoff Page: Two Poems

Two Cheers

 

Why is it, coming in to land,

we’re always touched with strange affection—

the terra cotta of the rooves,

the narratives of small backyards,

the many motivations in

those capsules flowing on the roads?

How is that, for all our shortfalls,

we manage to get so much right?

Something in this tilting down

absolves our shallowness,

forgives the callow politician

chasing down a vote?

An excess of venality

can still arouse some sort of shame.

The gaps between our damned and blessed

are not immeasurably grotesque.

The rich, so far, do not require

excessive heights of razor wire.

Our history is a kind of weight

we’re finding easier to wear

now it’s more than half-acknowledged.

Our default expectation is

a modicum of decency—

though this may sometimes not apply

at 3 a.m. in CBDs.

Our satisfaction with ourselves

has not quite yet contrived to spoil

our cachet as a destination.

Impatient with our clerks,

long queues of the imperilled

are paying still to risk the waves.

Our paedophiles and psychopaths

ensure we’re less than fully human.

We’re slanting now across the farms,

a final stretch of water or

a thickening of streets.

Things look way better from this height;

the syntax can be clearly seen.

“Cabin crew, prepare for landing.”

We’ve cause to strut — but not to preen.

 

Geoff Page

 

 

Certain Churches

 

1.

The Gustav Vasa Church in Stockholm

essentially is Romanesque

with just a few Hellenic columns

fresh from its designer’s desk.

 

The dome, though eighty metres high,

compared to Chartres’ spires, is squat.

The Swedes resist the soar of Gothic

and are contented with their lot.

 

2.

Here at Dresden’s Frauenkirche

the church is somehow bouncing back.

We catch the choir in rising thirds.

The Stasi never had the knack

 

of cracking what the church provides:

a tribe outlasting politics.

The Stasi were self-righteous too

but God’s a problem hard to fix.

 

3.

We’re at the Thomas church in Leipzig.

The organ playing, all stops out,

reminds agnostics what they’ve lost

with all that emphasis on doubt.

 

J.S. Bach and Philip Larkin

contend here gently in the mind.

The bleakness and the soaring both

invaluably left behind.

 

4.

Late afternoon at Hallau, we

are strolling slowly through the vines.

The church is white and protestant.

The grapes rise up to it in lines

 

not easily interpreted.

Threaded through each Testament,

those metaphors concerning wine

may be what God more truly meant.

 

 

5.

Their church is halfway up the hill;

the graves are Lutheran and spare.

No angels or rococo flourish—

dates and name are all that’s there.

 

Once or twice a small motif,

a wreath perhaps, a sandstone flower.

Self-disciplined in life and death,

they each await the day and hour.

 

 

6.

Somewhere south of Strömstad still

it’s standing now as it was when

I glimpsed its hayfield newly-mown.

Those hay bales stay beneath my pen

 

as, writing this a few days on,

I’m heading southwards on a train.

Why is it Swedish churches live

so long inside a doubter’s brain?

 

Geoff Page