Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.
In the grave they laid Him, Love who had been slain,
Thinking that He never would awake again,
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.
Forth He came at Easter, like the risen grain,
Jesus who for three days in the grave had lain;
Quick from the dead the risen One is seen:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.
When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,
Jesus' touch can call us back to life again,
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.
John Macleod Campbell Crum
*
Avaunt you cullions! I am awake. Seems like everyone on the island is working in a chipper in Galway till the worst of winter is over, but me is not. Me is here. Me is sniffing out those wild and holy saints. I lope over the island with flapping tweed, say hello to the goats and THE WIZARD (remember the horse with the cape), and – with an oddly sour head, like a hangover without consuming a drop – I find myself at St Caomhan’s church.
I bang on down the tough grasses and the sand. I sit and I sit till I don’t want to sit anymore. Come back in the dark, says something in my head. I would like to see more churches half in the soil like this, deeply submerged in the land. There’s something of the cave to them.
In some Moby Dickian way, it feels like the Whaleman’s chapel. I peer around for the books of Father Mapple to preach truly to the scaley, brined face of falsehood. To berate us Jonahs in the fish, with our rum-coloured teeth and mermaid-led, us refusing to go to scary cities and get our fricking heads dashed on those hot pagan rocks. Maybe some of us have a secret contract to stay here in limbo, down here in the coal black depths. Neither quite here or there.
Maybe we have made a home down here in this nautical rest place. Maybe in our derangement this is our spuming Eden, our green-weedy solace, our glug, glug barnacled paradise. We need old Father Mapple to remind us that Jonah didn’t use his prayers for plea bargaining, but acceptance of his new cell, his deserved wallop, his bad-bollocking, his punishment.
Yes, talk us round Father Mapple, sober us up. Brother Queequeg sits next to me, eyes gleaming and darting to the waves, blade running over the blackthorn club he is carving. He is reminding me of what D.H. Lawrence says about the sea.