After the Chorus

Send us Fan MailWords: Rev'd Jon SwalesMusic Pixabay: Piano LamentAfter the Chorus/After the NoiseI 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 ChorusDo 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.