Matthew 27: 51   And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split.

From way back here the beauty of war is hard to miss
Impossible to dismiss the moment of ‘massive ordnance’,
So intense that afterwards the cinema of cloud formation
Seems like afternoon TV. But what if
Destruction is less creative, the closer-up you come?
I have in mind how physical pain demeans all other considerations
Remember, it wipes away everything but pain itself.
And what of those entire lives spent in the aftermath, clearing up?

So that’s how it’ll be for most of us when our time comes!
Not seen and heard and recognised for its terrible beauty, more like
A tawdry giving-up of everything but the next breath, which
For want of anything more to stay for, then becomes your last.

Sublime requires ridiculous, not only as its opposite.
They may also change places, according to where you’re sitting.

1 Corinthians 11:24  And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said ‘This is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’

Whose body is the bread; whose blood flows like wine. But whose is the ‘whose’ here – son of God, or son of yours and mine?

Let’s say it’s the son of man, then bread-into-body is what we create.

To transubstantiate is no loftier than the higher state which people, plain people, may enter into when we come together.

No need for the grace of God; these moments we ourselves make in order to make ourselves more human.

Yet just because we can, does not mean that the body politic will always be provided.

Take the recent summit of G7 foreign ministers, holding court in a grand palazzo.

Circular table, tastefully decorated, all set for History to sit down for supper with the secretaries of state. But that day, History must have had another date.

Pity the poor ministers, who don’t know how to celebrate.*

*In the liturgy of the Mass, the celebrant performs Jesus’ role at the Last Supper.

Matthew 26, 14: Then one of the Twelve—the one called Judas Iscariot—went to the chief priests and asked, “What are you willing to give me if I deliver him over to you?” So they counted out for him thirty pieces of silver. From then on Judas watched for an opportunity to hand him over.

Nobody does it for the silver, surely – never enough pieces to hang a new life on.
And is the Judas kiss the tenderest of them all? Knowing it’s the one and only.

They stopped the car and told the young volunteer his life was coming to an end.
After lengthy interrogation by enemy forces, he had revealed what little he knew.

Released by the British, he was de-briefed by his own side, and advised he’d soon be home. Instead the car turned off so that he could be taken somewhere suitably out-of-the-way, and shot.

Having talked (who wouldn’t?), and being known to have blabbed, he was considered a security risk. But the volunteer was so much a soldier for the cause, it is said that even in these circumstances he accepted his own death as for the greater good.

Looking back at the days of ‘Stakeknife’, the IRA gunman who was really running for the Brits, as revealed in full in last night’s Panorama, the harder question is not what was done, but what, in those days, it was done for.

The war that dared not speak its name, was bound to be a patchwork of double cross and deceit. But where the ex-combatants’ eyes have stayed purposefully clear, how different is their former zeal – legible in their faces even now. How different from doing the deal, doing the deal, which is the only order of today.

Perhaps we need but note there are different kinds of betrayal.

Matthew 26, 6: Now when Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came up to him with an alabaster flask of very expensive ointment, and she poured it on his head as he reclined at table. And when the disciples saw it they were indignant, saying ‘why this waste? For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor.’

Am I, aren’t I? Do I, don’t I? What are you willing to believe?

Damien the diamond, bald geezer who also plays with emeralds and the truth

His latest wheeze – he coughed fifty million quid to produce it,

Y’all better believe it, includes everything but the kitschen sink.

From Death and Myth to Disneyland

And who’s to say how many cigarette papers there are between them?

Just so’s you can make what you will out of my make believe.

And if you believe that…, the sceptics say,

For this is extravagant, decadent, insanely opulent

Market-making hyperbole.

But if Hirst’s Treasures can make kitsch, sublime,

Then he’s found the (postmodern) philosopher’s stone

Whereas a penny spent’s already too much pish,

If all there is from him is further deconstruction.

Matthew 12, 13:  Then he said to the man, ‘stretch out your hand’. So he stretched it out and it was completely restored, just as sound as the other.

In the medical photograph you can see a hairy forearm, wrist, thumb, part of the man’s palm, and then your eyes tell you that the fingers must be stretched backwards, out of sight.

But that’s not right: the fingers are not there in the picture because they’re not there at all. This is what’s left of the hand of Chris King, aged 57, after a metal pressing machine amputated most of it – and most of his other hand, also.

In 2013, at a lighting factory near Doncaster, the machine-guard failed and his hands were scythed away. Like lightning.

Earlier this month, however, Chris wrote a thank-you letter to the doctor who sewed him a new pair.

He has achieved a remarkable level of manual dexterity since major surgery in July 2016; and there will be two more years of further progress, according to Professor Simon Kay, who took the hands of a recently deceased donor and attached them to Chris’ stumps.

Already ticked off: undoing shirt buttons, clapping, holding a cup of tea, pouring a pint. Still to do: tying shoelaces, fastening shirt buttons; then Velcro gets the long goodbye.

Bones, tendons, nerves, blood vessels: they’re all connected up and tied together. One man’s blood is flowing through another man’s fingers; though the texture of the flesh remains unusual, almost unsavoury.

Parts of the patient’s hands are pale and puffed up – you might think he was suffering from gout; and in press photographs he is seen cradling one hand with the other, as if there’s something babyish and unfinished about them.

Perhaps Chris is close to acknowledging this when we calls his hands, ‘my boys’. But at least he’s not suffering from ‘they’re not my hands’ syndrome, a hostile psychological reaction which has afflicted other beneficiaries of this ground-breaking surgery. read more

Matthew 21, 8: And a very great multitude….cut down branches from the trees and strewed them in the way.

It was to have been a glorious procession

From photo-shoot to street-life, the starlet’s progression

Nevermind the film within-a-film, outwith the play of reel-to-real

The message in the bottle – Peace, is what we were meant to feel

Bottle breaks, glass splinters, puncturing the starlet’s tender skin

Hostile crowd rolls up the red carpet: ‘You know nothing of the state we’re in,

Little Miss Privilege, riding into town on your half-sister’s ass.’

But leaving slebs aside, who’s been milking what, is the question (not) to ask.

How, then, does it start? As a piece of cake, perhaps.
Thin slice to begin with, nothing rude or impolite, then another
And another, until there’s no more left of him to bake or break

After hours of Goating in the pub, what little self-control you had
Collapsed like the dominoes he enjoys. His not looking for trouble,
You took it as your cue and chose to trouble him with it.

And is there one of you that takes the lead – the one always tipped to succeed?
In school and on the street, the thickness of his hair, the way it hangs….
Different days might have seen the man decorated, ’stead of ‘ringleader’ and ‘accused’.

Or nothing of the sort. Only time hanging heavy and chance presents itself
Like cookies cooling on a plate when no one else is looking,
And afterwards – pangs of regret for having taken too much.

So much the boy you beat nearly died – fractured eye socket,
Fractured spine, bleed on the brain. And did it begin with a question:
Why are you even standing there, inviting our disdain?

‘He crashed a car’, said the clean-cut man, ‘took out
Some pedestrians’. Head yawing from side to side
He wants it to sound like plain sailing, but the words
Are wont to drift off-course: ‘they were just laying there….’

‘Take out’ – a tinge of soldier talk? If so then ‘laying’
Is unconsciously NCO instead of officer class
That’s if suit-and-tie guy is the proper hard-nut in civvies
This day, when an eggshell skull cracked and made omelettes
Of passers by and tourists on Westminster Bridge.

Swivels sideways, sniffs it back in and holds
Hand over mouth for personal protection.
Still there’s a moment when he just might crumple and cry
Fingers clouding the lens – concern for his privacy
Then our Mr Clean-Cut finds his level again: ‘I’ve never
Seen anything like that.’ Like flat, pat and off he goes.

‘Blood…’ [sonorous for a second] ‘…and everything’ [now scaling down again];
For Rocky Horror’s the only show the young visitor knows to go to
With what he’s seen; he also knows it shouldn’t be.

Where conscience makes cowards of us all, he has none left.
Now what would you have him do? This sergeant’s in
An altered state, after six, long months
Killing or not killing as often as we ask him to.

Transporting an outsize parcel through green vegetation
And earth the colour purple. Going in after a ’copter strike
Usually there isn’t much left: his men are used to
DNA samples – body parts collectable for ‘biometric enrolment’.

Today the sample is much bigger: still breathing; needs carrying
Grunts sweating and swearing, under a weary life
Each four-letter syllable assaults the trudge through enemy terrain,
Hauling what’s left of a man who’s likely dying anyway.

‘Can’t believe I’m doing this,’ one of the company complains.
His sergeant responds with a nasty little noise – the nine millimetre
Pistol shot, flat (splat!), and seemingly of no consequence.
Though later it leads to a murder conviction, commuted
Last week to manslaughter on grounds of mental abnormality.

Acting in the interests of his men – that’s what they say.
Carrying out a cold-blooded execution – according to the first court martial.
Outcome of adjustment disorder, the second bench has said.
Who knows how much of which and why assume they’re separate?

The point is a man tasked every day with action beyond the everyday.
The tick and tock of his daily commute clearly heard
In the parting words fired at the Taliban prisoner:
‘There you are – shuffle off this mortal coil, you cunt.’

A sentence rising high as Hamlet’s consideration of mortality,
Lying down with mingey beasts inside the beats of a bar.
This single cadence contains the gutter and the sky;
And that is the war music the piper was paid to play.

‘Let’s see y’all again, let’s see y’all again’. From behind the un-steady cam, a mock-inviting voice calls out to the convoy of pick-ups departing the family party scene in Douglas County, Georgia.

That’s July 2015. What date for the next gathering of the clan?

27 February 2017 they were due for sentencing. Namely, Kayla Rae Norton (25) and Jose Ishmael Torres (26), who had said he would shoot the little niggers at the eight-year-old’s birthday party, pointing a shotgun and waving the Confederate flag.

‘Respect The Flag’, they and their friends called themselves, tearing across half the state in half-a-dozen trucks.

Years to serve for ‘street-gang terrorism’: thirteen and six; his’n’hers, both of them banished for ever from the county.

In the 2020s they’ll be coming out to meet their grown-up children. The woman who was pogoing with fear and anger at the time of the incident, now sits head in hands at the thought of a mother parted from her kids for so long; though afterwards she says that justice was done.

‘Not me, it’s not him, it’s not me.’

Long hair pulled back untidily, elasticated face six-year stretched with crying, Norton can’t explain how it was her that day, even while admitting her it was; even when she’s nudged through the courtroom door and down to the cells.

‘Respect,’ they said; but not as in Aretha.