Poetic licence: ask me for that half-remembered line
I’ve got a new job. It doesn’t pay but who needs pay? (I do, of course, but God will provide. He will drop ham rolls from the sky at lunch and strawberries in season. God is good.)
I have been doing this job for years without noticing, or rather without recognising it as a job. But a job is just a task that needs doing, or a service that needs providing, and the service that I’ve been providing is that of poetry con . . . golly that was close. I nearly wrote, and I apologise for doing so, consultant.
It would be hard to choose a worse word than consultant, a word more drained of meaning, a word that does more to deceive, to hide or fudge reality. Sales consultants, real estate consultants, consumer consultants, solution consultants, this is language as smokescreen, paplanguage, language with the consistency of sofa stuffing.
Nevertheless I almost said it because for once in its sorry life it would be the apt word to use: a consultant is one whom people consult about a matter, and people do consult me about poetry. But the word is unusable so that’s that.
I don’t know what other title to give the job but I don’t care. Titles are for hiding behind.
If I need one God will provide. He’ll drop the right words in all unexpectedly among the strawberries and rolls. It’s how the darling works. So let me tell you straight about the job itself so good old God can eavesdrop.
People consult me about poetry. Not about writing the stuff, of course. If they tried that I’d give them short shrift. But they consult me about poetry that others have written, often hundreds of years ago, and I give them long shrift. Limitless shrift, in fact, because I like being consulted.
Typically they phone or write or email with a half-remembered line, the ghost of something they were taught at school or that their mum recited, and that moved them once upon a time. We remember being moved, or touched. It’s the strawberry of surprise that falls from a cloudy sky.
They ask me if I can identify the beast they half remember. It is nice to be asked and nicer still to succeed.
Yesterday a man rang. The half line that he half recalled was about the wind being behind you. He’d Googled it with no success, or rather with too much success: the billion search results were a haystack too far. I was his last hope of a needle-finder and here I have no choice but boastery. I asked a couple of questions then I guessed and guessed it right. It was that lovely ancient lyric translated from the Irish. I expect you know it: May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face; the rains fall soft upon your fields
and until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.
The man was grateful and I was smug. But we were both also gratified. For we had arrived at what we all love, the distillation of a feeling or a truth in words both memorable and beautiful. That’s poetry.
Poetry’s everywhere, or at least attempts at poetry are everywhere. Pop music is poetry. Most of it is corny eighth-hand cliche´-ridden worthless poetry, but poetry nonetheless. Advertising jingles are formulaic, manipulative, dishonest poetry. The words in greeting cards are poetry of a cloying saccharinish half-truth sort, but still they’re poetry. None of these will swim down time’s gutter.
But the best stuff does. It lodges in the skull and it is handed down for generations and it persists when all the stuff that’s meant to matter, all the money, power and politics, have long since crumbled to oblivion. The good stuff lives because it’s true and beautiful.
I’ve got a headful of it. I’m drenched in it. A while ago a woman rang and said, “Please help me, Joe” and I said I would try and she said, “All I’ve got is reindeer running.”
I didn’t have to try. I knew immediately. “It’s Auden’s Fall of Rome,” I said, “a masterpiece from first to last, and here is how it ends: Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss Silently, and very fast.
“That’s it,” she said, “that’s it exactly,” and I could hear the strawberries of excitement in her voice.
“The pleasure is all mine,” I said, and I said true. It’s a nice job.
What’s in a name? It all depends. Forty-eight years ago, as new immigrants from the UK, we were welcomed by local folk — neighbours, colleagues, etc. and were made to feel ‘at home’.
Two years later we became “Kiwis”, with a certificate to prove it and entitlements we would not otherwise have had. Yet it was irrelevant to our acceptance by a growing circle of friends for who we were. We felt no need to protest at being teased as “Poms”.
Yet a jarring note for me as a Christian was the common use of the name Jesus as an expletive. I recall one fellow worker showing surprise when I objected.
Strange you never hear the name of any other religion’s deity or prophet used in this way. I could imagine the riot that would cause in some circles.
Yet why is Jesus as a figure of history fair game? Let’s turn it around the other way. Apart from not offending someone else, why should the name of Jesus at least be held in the highest regard?
In 1st century Israel, Yeshua (Joshua) was a common name, arousing memories of Moses’ warrior-successor. Jesus is simply the anglicised Greek form. Yet this Yeshua aroused hostility — and mockery too — in halls of power.
Why? Partly because, in contrast to His earlier namesake, He rejected any notion of conquering by force of arms. He also rejected compromise with the devil. But, more pointedly, the honest righteousness he preached