Sanctuary. Martyn Halsall

       Crow Music

       Mass for Hands

       Watching the Eucharist

       Intentions

       Postscript: Wing

       Notes and Acknowledgements

      To Isobel:

      wife, mother, teacher, priest;

      who believed in it.

      Preface

      Cathedrals seem to be among the scarce places where church congregations are growing, perhaps because they offer place and worship for people to encounter God without being corralled into ‘parish strategies’, or dragooned into impersonating submarines or orang-utans in ‘action songs’.

      Cathedrals magnetise visitors without demanding immediate membership, and inherent commitment. They introduce the Christian past into the secular present, and patiently celebrate the presence of God in a society where s/he is felt often to be as redundant as a coal miner, or as optional as a poet.

      Cathedrals intrigue, so people respond. They are generous in many ways, including their encouragement of discerning God through the arts. They take risks, often using the arts experimentally in creative theology, venturing into the radical and the prophetic.

      They provide spiritual hospitality to the jaded; a place with the risen Christ to re-imagine the familiar, and dare fresh potential. They share space to renew and redeem lives, in the companionship of the Holy Spirit. They offer sanctuary.

      Most of these poems reflect aspects of the life and faith of one cathedral. They were drafted, after a life in journalism, in a new role as the first Poet in Residence of Carlisle Cathedral. Like journalism, they grew from notes, conversations, observations, reflections and experiences; from being there.

      Prelude: Leaving St Bridget’s

      Came the day and the master said: ‘It’s finished,

      it’s good work.’ We all stepped back to look

      up for once, as the priest was always asking.

      What did he see? Not the callous under squared stone

      lifted, set day after day. Not grey and grit

      of mortar, not scaffold and winded hoist swaying

      in a cross-raising, but high blues and whites

      of Our Lady, and an angels’ sky. We raised our eyes.

      The master said: ‘Time to be packing the carts, then

      off to the next one.’ First he let us wander

      to see the whole thing, feel the others’ work:

      that angle in the arrowed door, that soar

      of arch over altar, ‘stone rainbow span’

      as the priest described it; each frame of light

      where we set eternity square. Each footstep

      took us further away. One pause, to look back

      at the scale of it, ship above the mill of huts,

      then a bend in the lane. A stand of thinning ash

      made a picket between us and our past. Four days

      tramping churned roads through buffet and drench.

      A Roman line to start, then a gesture of sea,

      and gradually, when the sky stood back a bit,

      a level of hills pegged true, like the new walls

      we’d raise when we arrived, a dream in stone

      built in St Mary’s name. New Latin word,

      and world: ‘cathedra’.

      Foreign Correspondent

      You touch down, wondering about language,

      your need for a translator, your contacts book

      thin on the ground. You face deadlines to update

      news running for centuries, to find a new

      line beyond headlines of decline, or saviour.

      You are set between last flight, next empty morning,

      sit at the back, watch, attempt the low profile

      of a holy visitor or resident angel, caught

      between being yourself, and representing who sent you.

      So many potential angles: those identities

      carved for a screen, those poets poised by the door

      for a quick exit, Jacobite prisoners, that idea of collecting

      stars to roof the psalms, graffiti, translating runes.

      You remember those sitting by phones, waiting for a story.

      Close

      Always surprised by gulls that call this city

      awake, or scratch the morning with sharpened shrieks

      that stretch over holy towers and overlapped lorries

      offloading in delivery bays. Eternity’s

      still in the Close. A single cyclist sidles

      shyly from Morning Prayer, unchains his bike;

      a trio of schoolboys, uniforms trimmed to trend,

      gossip by with identical bags, as advertised.

      The copper beech alters its colour secretly

      in slowly turning light; lichens become

      green again in sun’s reach, first thrush rehearses

      his song, beyond organ practice muffled by sandstone.

      Those passing stroll, outlined by sunlight, as

      sound seeps through from the city’s undertow.

      Devotions could come outside this spotlit morning,

      a sort of prayer cast into the shape of birdsong:

      with reference to the gargoyles’ twisted suffering,

      rattle of a train that slows down after distance,

      those passing with their needs, baggage, potential;

      how shadow is moved by light, occasional voices

      discussing the day ahead, nurse and dog-walker,

      those listening in through headphones, the bowed heads

      furrowing into busyness, and that capacity

      for all prayer to surprise: sudden oystercatchers.

      Akeland

      I found the pencil, lost out in the Close,

      lime stripe as straight as mown cathedral lawn,

      sharpened to the point where its given Cumbrian name

      had