Their Ears are Dull of Hearing

“And these are the garments that you shall craft –
A breastplate, an ephod, and broideried coat,
A mitre, and girdle of curious draft.”
And thus it was written, for thus they wrote.

And you shall take gold, and purple, and blue,
And scarlet, and fine twined linen and thread,
With much cunning work, and onyx stones two.”
And thus it was written, for thus they said.

“These are the garments most holy you’ll make
For priests, that they may minister me
In glory and beauty, and for my sake.”
And thus it was written, eternally.

Plans and measurements, timber and twill –
The Ark, the Altar, the Tabernacle.
Why do we need to remember these still ?
Haven’t we more pressing matters to tackle ?

“Ham begat Put begat Cush begat Nimrod,
And Lotan, and Shobal, and duke Zibeon,
And Shem begat Elam and Aram and Lud…”
And thus it was written, and on, and on.

“Seethe not the kid in the milk of his mother,
Now mine is the firstling from out of the womb,
And thou shalt not make of a slave of another…
No, let’s drop that last one – we’ve run out of room…”

There’s no ‘We’ in Corpus Christi

There once was a priest
Who thought he was a priest,
But who wasn’t in the Lord’s own eyes.
For, to be a priest
You must at very least
Have already been fully baptised.
And I am that priest,
Who thought his path was greased
Right into the body of the Church.
But my own parish priest
Who performed on me the piece
Messed up, and left me in the lurch.
For old Father East
Was a jovial priest
Who knew that my parents were stressing –
So to put them at their ease,
He thought it quite a wheeze
To fully loop them into the blessing –
“To the Lord God who frees us
And in the name of Jesus
We all here christen you, our cute little guy.”
But God had closed his ears
To the heartfelt font-side cheers –
For the priest had said that ‘We’ instead of ‘I’.
So when the truth was teased,
How the Church was less-than-pleased !
For I wasn’t then a priest to begin…
Each wedding vow ceased
To be valid in the least
As the couples fornicated in sin.
Ev’ry moral I policed,
Ev’ry absolution leased
Was a sham in its promise and its hope.
Their souls had been fleeced
And sold off to the Beast –
For this priest has gone on to be Pope.

I Want to Believe

Yes, I believed you when you told me
What you’d lately overheard –
The more bizarre, the more you sold me,
Gasping ev’ry neon word.

For you confirmed my long suspicion,
Secrets from the other side
That I now learned without permission
And which they had fought to hide.

But then, then you snatched away your proof,
In a manner so offhand-cruel
To this lonely seeker of the truth
With an oh-so-cheerful “April fool !”

My face went as red as my vision,
And my pride with my stammered denial
As I drowned on a wave of derision,
Spat on by my own inner bile.

But if you hadn’t blown the gaffe,
I’d still believe the stuff you’d spun
For what to you is just a laugh,
To me, for once, was a moment in the sun.