A Glory of Death (An Anglican Ghost I)

An Anglican Ghost is an idea I have for an anthology of semi-confessional, semi-religious, semi-philosophical poems based on the search for a satisfying, Medievalist (pre-Enlightenment) spirituality in a post-modern age. Miracles and prophecies in a time of iPhones, I guess.

We begin, of course, with Death:
a class on vanishings of things.
A barn of Holy Wealth...
inside, a human choir sings.

The Joy is crystalline:
Death has consummated its vows,
so in this church, unseen,
the smiling penitent may drowse.

Outside the barn, in fields -
un-manicured from floor to clime,
a wildness without its yields -
animals grow lost, meantime.

An age ago they breathed,
as austere ghouls in sheer houses.
But life, in death, was wreathed
in stainless crowns of bliss.

The grand, Med'eval tune
is leaking out between the planks,
the hayloft's august moon
attending, through a hole, above.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The image of the barn and the animals is borrowed from The Last Battle, the last novel in C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, in which the citizens of Narnia gather outside a barn to be judged by Aslan, the God-figure. The good citizens join Aslan in Aslan's Country (Heaven), while the bad are turned into animals which scurry away.