Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

       The church was cold, not that the old man noticed. He wore his fear like an overcoat, an aura that would have been palpable if anyone had made close contact. An aura of spiritual dread.

       A dark building against an unforgiving skyline from without, neither did the church offer much comfort internally. The colours of the stained glass windows were muted, the vaguest hint of light filtering through. He took the pew at the very back. Splinters stood out where someone had carved a set of initials;  the hassocks were threadbare.  The handful of souls clustered in the foremost pews provided a good cross-section of the city’s dispossessed.  The shabby attire of homelessness hung round one of them;  the smell of another indicated a losing battle with cheap spirits; a third rocked backwards and forwards to the silent song of some undiagnosed psychiatric disorder.

       From the pulpit, a white-haired priest was delivering a fire-and-brimstone sermon. The old man had not seen this kind of frenzied performance, which seemed to owe more to Hollywood than  any seminary, in many years. The priest’s face was lined, his hair thinning on top but bushy and unkempt. The old man’s outward appearance was similar, but whereas the priest’s skin had been furrowed by the passage of five or six decades, the old man had laboured for longer and with a far greater burden than the mere process of ageing.

       He felt older, and less prepared for the execution of his duty, than at any other time during all his years of waiting. The coat of fear seemed to pull itself tighter around him, a reminder that readiness was everything. He’d lapsed before. In houses of intoxication and houses of ill-repute he’d wilfully embraced oblivion.  Insensation took from him the weight of his purpose, but temporarily. He always returned to the path, sought regeneration in the house of God.

       This church, though - this church did nothing to strengthen his resolve. If anything, he felt weaker. He forced himself to slow his breathing. His mind began to clear of the confusion that had driven him in here. The priest’s diatribe stopped being a machine gun burst of unintelligible sounds, definite words emerging. ‘Lamb’ and ‘scroll’ were prominent among them. The sermon seemed to consist of a more or less verbatim reading of the Revelation of John.

       The old man slumped in the pew. This was his reminder, here in this comfortless church. There was no getting away from it.
       ‘Then I watched as the Lamb broke the first of the seven seals’, the priest declaimed, ‘and I heard one of the four living creatures say in a voice like thunder, Come!  And there before my eyes was a white horse, and its rider held a bow. He was given a crown and he rode forth, conquering and to conquer’.

       Not one rider, the old man knew, but many. Kalashnikovs in place of bows, the cloth on their heads the crown of fanaticism. They would ride out of the desert on white Arabian horses and blood would flow with oil and no one would know anything about it until it was too late.

       ‘When the Lamb broke the second seal, I heard the second creature say, Come!   And out rode another horse, all red. To its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and make men slaughter one another, and he was given a great sword’.

       The old man could read it like tomorrow’s headlines: turbulence in the former Soviet Republic destabilising the already volatile arena of world politics, the sickle no longer emblematic of workers but a weapon in the hands of the Russian Mafia and those assassins brazen enough to sell their services in classified advertisements. Those at the epicentre of chaotic violence from which the angel who carried the seal of the living God would rise.

       ‘When he broke the third seal, I heard the third creature say,  Come!  And there, as I looked, was a black horse; and its rider held in his hand a pair of scales’.

       The black robes of judge and barrister, their profession a microcosm of the class system, had become as the hooded robe of the Reaper in a graphic novel, a symbol of grim inevitability. The scales of justice, never at any time calibrated with anything as idealistic as that which they represented, had tipped against the individual time after time, measuring out prejudice and inequality. Reparations were due and the old man had his part to play. He could no more run from it than he could escape the foreknowledge that God’s justice would be meted out with an unblinking severity to make the coldest, most austere High Court judge seem lenient.

       ‘When he broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth creature say, Come!  And there, as I looked, was another horse, sickly pale; and its rider’s name was Death, and Hades came close behind. To him was given power over a quarter of the earth, with the right to kill by sword and by famine, by pestilence and wild beasts’.

       The old man shook his head. How often had the priest recited that passage? How many had listened without thinking? It wasn’t even a question of interpretation - it was staring them in the face. They only had to open a newspaper and take their pick, from Aids and ebola to salmonella and CJD, from isolated outbreaks of fast-acting viruses to the famine scything through the Third World population. The portents were there - undeniable, inescapable - yet the masses looked right past them, looked to the spin-doctored advances of medical technology, an area of science that had never even got round to curing the common cold.

       ‘When he broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered for God's word and for the testimony they bore’.

       The six million Jews massacred in the Holocaust, not to mention every other victim of religious persecution. A martyred multitude whose patient appeals to God would very soon be honoured. The old man could see the point - the levelling of humanity, the sins of man erased entirely, nothing overlooked. The theory was fine, but the physical actuality troubled him. A sin was a sin was a sin  - a million times over he told himself this - but to obliterate the gambler, the drinker and the one who failed to keep the Sabbath in the same fire that consumed the murderer, the pederast and the rapist  -  It lacked proportion.

       ‘Then I watched as he broke the sixth seal. And there was a violent earthquake - ’

       Another holocaust, this one nuclear -

       ‘ - the sun turned black as funeral pall and the moon all red as blood -’

       -the ash rising over a ruined landscape, darkening the sky, blotting out even the fireball -

       ‘then the kings of the earth, magnates and marshals, the rich and the powerful, and all men, slave or free, hid themselves in caves and mountain crags -’.

       - and even the royalty and politicians and scientists and those not of the hierarchy who had, through inveiglement, secured themselves places in the underground bunkers would feel no safer than wounded animals, trapped and awaiting the coup de grace -

       ‘ -and they called out to the mountains and the crags, Fall on us and hide us from the face of the One who sits on the throne and from the vengeance of the Lamb- ’

       trapped like wounded animals, the mile-thick walls of their shelters would be as the paper of Japanese lanterns before the wrath of God.

       ‘For the great day of their vengeance has come and who will be able to stand?’

       The old man buried his head in hands that shook like those of the drunk at the front of the church. The words that came next were inscribed in his mind like the lettering on a tomb.

       ‘After this I saw four angels stationed at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds’.

       The letters had arrived that morning, from Washington DC, from Darwin and from Jerusalem - the postmarks alone told him what the situation was. Reading them had been a formality.

       ‘Then I saw another angel rising out of the east -’

       Or, more specifically, Red Square.

       ‘ - carrying the seal of the living God, and he called aloud to the four angels who had been given the power to ravage land and sea: Do no damage to sea or land or trees until we have set the seal of our God upon the foreheads of his servants - ’

       And that was his purpose, for which he had waited since the whole celestial plan had been set in motion, the course of mankind and its ultimate destruction preordained from the outset. His purpose: to effect a cessation of damage to the earth while the small matter of the Chosen was settled. A hundred and forty-four thousand from twelve tribes. Not that any of their number would be drawn from this city. The old man got to his feet, slowly as if arthritis wracked his joints. He didn’t need to hear the rest:  the silence after the seventh seal was broken, the sounding of the trumpets, the Archangel Michael casting Satan out of Heaven, Satan’s orgy of destruction on earth aided by the Beast and the False Prophet, the fall of Babylon, the outpouring of the vessels of wrath - In a word, Armageddon.

       The Day of Judgement.

       A huge cosmic full stop.

       The old man left the church. The renewal he’d sought had been denied him. The time was at hand and all he merited was a curt reminder. So be it. What did it matter if he performed it with jubilance or depressed resignation as long as his duty was done?

       He paused for a second and looked back. Through the open door, the priest presented an ill-defined but oddly familiar figure, like a distant relative out of focus in the background of a family photograph. He, too, had played a role, though he couldn’t have known.

       The old man dropped his gaze and walked on. He didn’t look back again. He turned the corner and mingled with a throng that grew thicker and more diverse as he slouched through the city centre. He was alone in a jostling crowd of businessmen, students, housewives, workmen, artists, thieves, lovers and dreamers. And none of them knew.