Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is a retired mathematician living in London. He is the current poetry editor of the online magazine London Grip and, in partnership with Nancy Mattson, has for over twenty years organised the Islington reading series Poetry in the Crypt (now re-invented as Poetry Above the Crypt). His latest book, Identified Flying Objects, contains poems triggered by quotations from the prophet Ezekiel and thus maintains the fondness for unusually-themed collections shown in his previous publications Poems in the Case, which combines poetry with a murder mystery, and Fred & Blossom which tells a more or less true story of love and light aviation in the 1930s.
The USP for Identified Flying Objects is that all the poems are linked to quotations from the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel. The idea of using this as a basis for a collection came to the author when he was semi-immobilised with a broken leg and, like Ezekiel, was working out how to deal with misfortune. The Book of Ezekiel is of course concerned with a much bigger misfortune – the plight of the Israelites taken captive by the Babylonians during the 6th century BC – and it seeks both to explain why God let it happen and also to offer a divine promise of eventual release.
Whatever one believes about its theological content, the Book of Ezekiel does contain some remarkable passages such as the first proposal for a heart transplant and an almost cinematic image of a valley full of dry bones which reassemble themselves and then gain sinews, flesh and skin to become living bodies. More down-to-earth (and still relevant) are the stern and imaginative rebukes Ezekiel delivers to corrupt and abusive rulers and his exasperated likening of the general public to ill-natured sheep led by incompetent and irresponsible shepherds. And of course there are also his mysterious visions in the sky which inspire the collection’s title poem.
Although the poems in this collection have been triggered by some of Ezekiel’s words they do not aim to paraphrase Ezekiel’s message. Some of them place an Ezekiel-like (or Ezekiel-lite!) speaker in a modern setting while others offer a twenty-first century reaction to a single image from the prophet’s text. Ezekiel might recognise – even endorse – the sentiments of a few of the poems; but many of them would probably puzzle him or even arouse his disapproval. Attitudes have changed in the last two and half thousand years and Ezekiel’s view of the collection might well include a Hebrew equivalent of the word “woke”. But, even if his words have been carelessly and anachronistically appropriated, Ezekiel’s prophetic voice might still be heard, urging present-day readers to resist the regrettably common human tendency to ignore well-founded predictions.
From Identified Flying Objects
when a doctor takes a stone-still heart
and substitutes donated tissue.
as a hopeless case you’ll take the risk –
rejection’s not your biggest issue.
wish you had been born with nerves of steel
instead of much-too-nervous tissue.
might not need replacement body parts
so much as fresh supplies of sisu.
**
only from behind a mask: perhaps
because they do not want to face you?
sleep before you’ve counted down from ten.
You hope his needle doesn’t miss you.
wearing scrubs – are antiseptic pecks
distractions so they can undress you?
don’t get solid food: will you survive
digesting only tiramisu?
**
needn’t care what rocks you’ll lose – your faith
in miracles is what’s at issue.
In your new-made heart my remedy
is grafting in forgiving tissue.
Sisu is a Finnish word whose meaning can be approximated by a combination of such concepts as stoicism and determined resistance.
We are managing the situation.
Whenever people flow like water
through the holy interlocking boxes
of a stadium, emporium
or auditorium, their leaders
and role models must be seen among them
only briefly rubbing elbows –
never pressing hands – and passing on
no more than they brought in with them.
They are all in this together.
As they stream through lobbies,
passages and concourses
from north and south not one of them
may leave the way they entered.
All turnstile counters click in one direction
for the regular attenders;
any strangers, misfits
or occasional creatives
have to slip through gaps in calculation.
Identified Flying Objects
Sceptics guess that magic mushrooms helped
to open Heaven – or perception’s doors –
in Babylon and show the awed and shocked
Ezekiel some version of
the gyroscope and helicopter
in advance of L. da Vinci.
Ezekiel did not make sketches. He left
words instead of blueprints. Hence his engines,
while attracting less mechanical
analysis than Leonardo’s,
leave a lot more room for extra
terrestrial imaginings.
can scrawl art deco doodles in our fields
and navigate the planet via ley lines.
Others say time-travellers
could show Ezekiel a future
three millennia ahead.
stuttering across Iraqi deserts,
stop-start – like the freeze-frame hovering
of hummingbirds he’d never known –
and bringing down much cruder forms
of shock and awe on Babylon.
Some explain Ezekiel’s vision as a clairvoyant’s (or time-traveller’s) preview of modern – perhaps military – technology. Josef Blumrich (The Spaceships of Ezekiel (1974)) claims it describes a genuine extraterrestrial encounter of the kind reported in literature dedicated to phenomena like UFOs, ley lines and crop circles.
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