By David Malin
Lord, where are You now, in these deserted tenements, this blackened skyline?
Leeds, Wakefield, Doncaster, I searched the grimy walls and torn billboards, and You were not there.
Nor were You in the grim expression of a workman at a hoarding,
like a man lost or a dead man or a man dragged up from death, forced to walk a nightmare.
Lord, I searched for You in a shopfront crammed with plastic dummies
in a shopfront filled with gadgets and the latest automata
in people talking into machines, but no longer to each other down empty streets where the people seem to have fled
I saw a man in a crazy cap
I saw a girl with green hair
You were not with them, Lord. Where are You?
I have seen the glazed look in Your creatures’ eyes
Standing in line for the dole, or the soup-kitchen
Unshaven shuffling men with downcast eyes
Gratefully receiving their manna of gyros or hand-outs.
Lord, will You return to us?
Could we find three wise men?
Snow, accidents on the roads –
Lord, where are You?
Advertisements for a new life
Flap idly in the breeze:
In travel agents’ windows
Holiday posters
Advertise a new life, a dream life;
All around us
Happiness is on sale.
In Romford, Wrexham, in Rochdale,
Where are You, Lord?
Where are You, Lord?
Among the baby-batterers of crowded cities?
Are You with the child-rapist, the drug dealer, the porn-merchant,
the corrupt politician?
Is Your mansion among petty crime, prostitution, police bribes?
Or is on TV, with its masquerade, its eternal face of soap
operas, reality shows and celebrity tawdriness
That make us feel our lives are like a child’s
But not Your children?
Or are You Lord of the Media?
Is Yours the Penance of the Newsreel?
Or are You rather, now, at home with the beggars, as You once
were, Or do You live with the rich, overlooking Hampstead Heath?
Would You raise Lazarus from the dead or donate his body to science?
Would You feed bread to the five thousand,
or direct them to the nearest Jobcentre?
Would You turn Your blood into wine, or watch it run out of the
faces of the disappointed, as it does, every day?
