The night sky sparkles with false stars

dying at the peak of purest brilliance

and sizzling, whining blasts of sound

celebrate broken bondage to the past.

St Peter is defied to tread our soil

in Roman sandals.

The joy of it!

To maim one's heritage

in tinsel Absolution!

To scorn the screeching shackles

that once bound chafing earth

to Heaven; the psyche purged

of Purgatory and Penance,

and Hell itself -

reminders banished in an

iconoclastic frenzy that rampaged

through the land,

demolishing its sacred pillars,

its effigies of Christ,

painting out its Virgins, saints and martyrs,

its presiding angels, and itself into a corner,

making church walls pale into insignificance

and imitate the 'whited sepulchres' of gospel fame.

After The Fall, the Fall, in the Fall.

Tonight a Bonfire of the subtler Vanities

takes place. Some of our forefathers

recognised the heresy of Relativism

which makes each his own god,

subscribing to self-made rules

in a solipsist cosmos doing battle

for mortal freedom

and inner peace

and blessed purpose,

jostling for a place in Paradise

secured with credit card and inflated renown,

or a Government with praeternatural vision.

The Church made Flesh was never perfect,

its faith undercut by human reasoning

and marauding logic; its power appropriated

by a hierarchy keen to rule the world itself

in God's name, while it divined

no curse in its flight of hubris,

nor that the founding tenets

had not moved an inch to left or right.

And still the wounded longing

for Restoration and scars repaired,

the pilgrim's staff abandoned

and the Cartographer dismissed.

At dusk, a Fall Guy mounts dead wood

to blaze in a convivial holocaust,

a parody of the soul's refining fire

and the fate of martyrs at the stake.

 

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