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Words: Rev'd Jon Swales
Music Pixabay: Piano Lament
After the Chorus/After the Noise
I wrote this travelling by train through the Alps from Rome to Paris, after reading John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.”
These two poems trace a movement from the triggered body, where worship can still feel like threat yet there still, despite numbing and distance, is a desire for encounter.
I. After the Chorus
Do not come to me now
as soft advice.
Not as the bright smile
at the church door.
Not as the chorus swelling
through the speakers,
all uplift
and upward hands.
The room is singing
its predictable liturgy —
the slow one,
the anthem,
the key change meant
to lift the heart —
and something in me
locks.
The body remembers
what the mouth
still cannot say.
One chord,
and the old rooms open.
The brand.
The corporate style.
The lanyards.
The smoothness of it all.
Words weaponised
like daggers:
‘you bring nothing of value
to this place.’
And suddenly I am back there,
inside the room
where harm was done
and called itself ministry.
So come like weather.
Come like rain
against the chapel windows
when the singing grows too loud,
when joy itself
feels like threat.
Break the locked places.
There are pews inside me
still occupied by ghosts,
whole liturgies of fear
recited in the blood,
old shames hanging there
like vestments
in the dark.
I have called it resilience.
I have called it faith.
I have called it carrying on.
Still the walls sweat.
Still the heart,
that small battered flat
above the old sanctuary,
lets in every echo
except peace.
So come not as guest
but as the one
who knows the building
was never theirs.
Kick in the swollen door.
Shatter the stained glass
of the god they handed me —
the one who looked too much
like power,
too much like control,
too much like men
who mistook harm
for holiness.
Burn what must burn.
The false shepherd.
The polished liturgy.
The songs that ask the wounded
to rise too quickly.
Batter my heart,
threefold mercy,
Father of the bruised,
Christ of the locked room,
Wild Goose moving
not in the amplifier’s roar
but in the tremor beneath it.
Undo me.
Not as they undid me.
Not to wound
but to make room
for breath.
For I have been
an occupied city,
streets patrolled by fear,
every chorus a siren,
every bridge lifted in worship
a trigger.
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