BACK INTO PARADISE

‘They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes’.

PSALM 63, VERSE 10, KING JAMES BIBLE

Walking through Borough Market one Friday night,

past bagged litter, cacophonous wine bars,

themed eateries, and food waste in gutters,

I saw, trotting across Cathedral Street,

seemingly following the arrow

to the main entrance to Southwark Cathedral,

a fox – heading for its hidden earth perhaps,

on hallowed ground near Shakespeare’s grave.

As I made for Borough High Street – a place

of perpetual emergency sirens,

an aimless thoroughfare of dreadful nights,

and my lodgings down a yard lined with fag ends –

I thought of how the diocesan fox

had looked my way as if acknowledging

a fellowship in cunning and survival.

I assumed there was a skulk of foxes

in the graveyard, part of London’s militia

of ten thousand foxy scavengers.

I remembered King Lear – who, of course, did not know

how it all would end – repenting the harsh, proud

foolishness of his age, reconciling

with Cordelia, relishing their being

together in prison, finding love at last.

Only fire from heaven, he said, would part them,

and banish them ‘like foxes’. I remembered

Samson, enflaming the tails of three hundred

foxes, and sending them into the fields

of the Philistines to scorch their corn,

their olive groves, their vineyards. And I wondered then

what sort of fervent fire there would have to be

to hound us all – the biblical strongman,

the mad king, the urban fox, and me –

back into paradise.