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polyphony

RESURRECTION

Our house, the street’s first, was built epochs ago

on Cheshire pastureland. There has been nothing

for history to note here – only births, deaths,

the occasional fire and break-in,

and marriages at the Methodist Church

almost opposite us. Empires collapsed

from within – Austro-Hungarian,

British, French, German, Ottoman, Russian,

and Soviet. Here only the seasons came,

and bed-sits, then gentrification.

 

Now the St Petersburg Resurrection

A Cappella Choir – founded post-Gorbachev

to sing the liturgy in concert halls –

performs this autumn night in the church feet

from our front door. So powerful is this octet

the first three rows are kept entirely empty.

The utilitarian space fills with that

Russian Orthodox polyphony

guaranteed to make even an infidel’s

neck hairs tingle – plangent, sonorant, soulful.

I think of Tolstoy’s novel ‘Resurrection’,

his last – the hypocrisy of suppression,

the injustices of poverty,

the long path to redemption through cold, dull wastes.

 

During the interval, like a scene

from some implausible cold war movie

three Russian men in DJs – the two basses

and the conductor/founder of the choir

quietly, almost surreptiously, leave

the building, and go into the shadows

of the small, bushy garden. Matches flare.

Three cigarette ends glow.

 

 

 

 

UBUNTU

The play had finished. There were a hundred

or so children of Orange Farm township –

a large, informal city of mostly

shacks, few paved roads, limited clean water.

These seven, eight, nine year olds lucky enough

to be in school had shrieked with fearful delight,

laughed with wonder, their imaginations

transforming the double classroom’s bare,

austere walls into Dumisani’s

journey through English, Sotho, Venda

Xhosa, Zulu so he could play his drum.

 

To thank us, their teacher asked them to sing

a hymn, ‘Waiting at the Gate’. I expected,

as at home, unsteady voices reaching

for monophony but no, here, each child

sang the harmonious line that suited

her or him, an infinite polyphony.

 

I can see them still – serious, confident,

as if what really mattered to them then

was the eternity beyond heaven’s gate

the words long for – and hear them now, their

culture’s joyful, heartbreaking harmony,

that commonwealth of sound.

 

 

 

Note: UBUNTU has been posted on June 16thYouth Day in South Africa.

 

 

 

DAWN CHORUS

Out one morning for an early flight,

when the sky was lit but the sun unrisen,

in a Surrey suburb full of trees,

the air itself I breathed was trembling

with the sound of all the songbirds of the earth,

an embracing, shimmering polyphony.

 

I hear it still – and remember a time,

walking home before dawn fifty years ago

in a Liverpool suburb filled with trees,

this fabled sound I had never heard,

a polyphony, shimmering, embracing,

the very air trembling.