kfg moore

Ecumenism

Here in what is a broken heart of Chapel Wales,
Equal in excess of holy buildings and alehouses,
There's nothing woolly about local Roman Catholics,
Nor are they run of the mill in their converted mill
Indeed a knickerbockered glory of a parish priest,
Forged in the whitish heat of an Oxford sort of movement,
And arriving on a white anachronism of a horse
Led high-churchly decorative processions
Defiant in blush or thrust-up forehead,
And rich in cloth of gold and poor people,
Through a culturally hostile curiosity,
In a sort of flash theological flashing.

"Fa-aith of our fa-athe-ers living still,
In spite of crazy show-off priests!"

And what of us neophytes and acoloytes,
Begowned in cassocks and surplus linen,
Victims of public and private exhibitionism,
Given unhappy prominence on one hand,
Forced to take erect eminence in the other,
And to suffer the red-faced heavy-breathed humiliation
Of extra-family ties or tyings-up in public settings?
Ours was the shame, the pain, but not the glory,
Some of the victims stayed on, dependent on forgetting,
But some of us escaped, more or less,
To try to tell the age old sorry story,
And give testimony to the false-man-hood
Of much-vaunted celibacy, at our expense.
 
© kfg moore