Walk into a Catholic church, and tell me what you see
A dead man, pierced and naked, hanging from a tree
A God you’re told to worship, though he looks like you and me
A dead man, pierced and naked, hanging from a tree
An ad that sells you sorrow, with some pain thrown in for free
A dead man, whipped and bloody, hanging from a tree
And you wonder how, with such a pitch, it ever came to be
A dead man, whipped and bloody, hanging from a tree
Since no one’s seen a dead man rise since AD 33
A dead man, sent to save us, hanging from a tree
What will survive of us is pseudonymous blog posts.
And the comments!
Don’t forget the comments.
You must not forget the comments, O Best Beloved.
Well, as they say – out for a Larkin, out for a Pound…
Clara
At sixteen she was a potential celebrity
With a distaste for caresses.
She now writes to me from a convent;
Her life is obscure and troubled;
Her second husband will not divorce her;
Her mind is, as ever, uncultivated,
And no issue presents itself.
She does not desire her children,
Or any more children.
Her ambition is vague and indefinite,
She will neither stay in, nor come ou
Fits me to a [missing] “t.”
“A Lark”
That was a quite a conquest,
the poor author of that aubade
about waking in the dark,
believing he’d go to prison.
And did not. That’s not so bad.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Larkin's_Awkward_Day
Today in Porn: Every Movement deserves a Korrektiv edition
Whatever you’re ‘trying to express’
Let it be understood
That ‘somehow’ God plaits up the threads,
Makes ‘all for the best’,
That we may lie quiet in our beds
And not be ‘depressed’.
This is the Korrektiv blog, silly – there are no readers!
A ludicrous house on serious earth it is.
And here I thought marriage and moving would clear your mind of all that.
Au contraire.
(No pram, nor yet any sign of one in the offing, though of course it’s coming eventually. But being Angelica’s husband already concentrates the mind wonderfully — on life and its mirror, art [and funhouse mirror, Korrektiv]. The challenge now is the same as it was in my celibate bachelorhood: Making time to read, observe, process, and do the work of putting the lines on the page. Marriage has always been my prime vocation; art, a secondary, ever subordinate to the first, even before I was married. Now I’ve answered that first calling — and my wife, Deo gratias, wants me to pursue the second. The logistics of moving and the necessities of setting up a household with my new bride did distract me from art and from this Kommunity for a few months, but that temporary distraction was a necessary precondition for a better-ordered life, permitting more sustained attention in future. That attention always will face competition, but understand (and here I speak as one who spent a decade unmarried after graduating college): It always did face competition. Now, the Lord has blessed me with a wise and strong ally in managing that competition and focusing that attention. I can’t promise any specific results. But I can warn you to expect some more noise soon, God help us all.)
Tobias Wolff: the [Catholic] exception that proves the rule?
And this much never can be obsolete.
We were bloggers once and young…
Sigh.
JOB
These links methinks deserve some drinks. Thanks NGPL.
We read each other for sport.
Walk into a Catholic church, and tell me what you see….
The poem has power. Will it be included in Caterwauls & Doggerels?
Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. Thanks for the kind word, Rufus.