www.joolzdenby.co.uk
The Web home for the Poet, Artist & Fiction Writer Jools Denby

Redemption

We will have redemption, we will be redeemed;
No terror in the night can bind us, and no bitterness destroy.
The future will be moon-clear and the past will be our guide;
As sorrow waters new growth, so pain will make us strong,
We will have redemption, we will be redeemed;

By the chaos of the sea, by the black earth in our hands,
By the surge of breath that drives us, by our own imperfect lives,
By the pure curve of a child's face and the mottled hand of age,
By the animals, by faith, by kindness and by blood
We will have redemption, we will be redeemed.

All of us: the lost, the broken and the fearful,
Those of us still searching and those of us still dreaming,
Those of us who live as outlaws and those of us tormented.
The gentle and the simple, the cynical and the savage,
We will have redemption, we will be redeemed.

With our own hands we will make it,
With our own lips we will seal it,
In our hearts we will keep it, sweet and true.
This by my own promise, I swear it will be so.
We will have redemption, we will be redeemed...

Joolz Denby 11th September 1996

+++

So Many Names Are Lost Now © Joolz Denby 26/04/04
(Commissioned by The Royal Armouries, Leeds and dedicated to Captain Ronald Mumford).

So many names are lost now; war-tilled fields of clotted poppies
waltz in ragged scarlet, blown by the breath of winds that carry a cruel
dust of bone; on far mountains, relics, stony as saints, lie silent under
vestments of snow; in white deserts, furnace-bright and inexorable,
empty ivory cages are all that remain of men who moved in those bodies,
in those earth-returning remnants; eyes, now still and sky-turned,
saw wonders, saw their children; saw love, friendship and desire; saw the
seasons’ long fertile turning; they witnessed the swift brute tangle
of combat; the sickening lurch of fear and smelt the coppery stink
of bright blood springing from other men they had learnt to call the enemy.

So many forms of warfare: the battle roiling with screams and the sky
above embroidered with the swift dark economy of carrion birds;
the tension of sieges, creaking with battering engines, the notched arrow
straining to leap ecstatic from the long bow, the sword named Widowmaker,
the great insect carapace of plate armour, the grim click of a rifle cocked,
the ratchet lurching dance of tanks, the trench soaked in mud and misery
that only poets knew the broken heart of, the sky ripped with tracer fire,
and the bomb; brutal, consuming - the vast, shocking detonation,
or a device, bound to the fanatic body of a child unable to understand what
death really is and how no god, but man, called them to that sacrifice.

So many memorials to our wars; we house its machines in bright halls and
wonder at their cruel beauty as they hang waiting for their time to come again,
but we forget the actuality of the lives these savage instruments took.
The dead cannot speak, cannot plead with us while the receding
waves of weeping fade and they dwindle into the dark despite
the ranks of crosses, the triumphal arches, the eternal flames.
Oh, all those boys, all those dead boys; how can we forget them?
How can we call them brutes or fools and turn away because we are
afraid to look at what they did, in case we see it in ourselves?
Read the names and call them home; chant a litany of remembrance.

So many lessons we never learnt; these dead should be our teachers,
they are the true witnesses, only they know the horror and the
ever repeating failure that is war; the sickness we return to generation
after generation because we fail to hear the testament of those who
were sacrificed to pride, to greed or to ideology - let the battlefield dead
take our hands in theirs and illuminate in the sweet blue twilight of our
memories the most precious truth we can ever learn - let there be peace;
learn this if nothing else: Let there be peace - listen, can’t you hear
their voices clamouring in a thousand tongues - let there be peace
for all of us and let all the fallen, all of them, truly rest in peace at last.

Read the names and call them home; chant a litany of remembrance.
Read the names and call them home.
Read the names and call them home.
Read the names - and call them home.

www.joolzdenby.co.uk
The Web home for the Poet, Artist & Fiction Writer Jools Denby