A Poem for Lent and Lockdown

Paul Weller shares a poem written during a challenging period of his life, one in which we may find comfort during Lent and lockdown.

Reflecting on his poem, Paul says:

Dredging back into my past, as for last term’s Park Bench, I have identified a poem that I wrote one night in a single room in which, for a period, I was living on my own during what was a particularly personally and professionally challenging period of my life.

I offer it to The Park Bench in the hope that it might have some resonance today for some of its readers in terms either of its allusions to the Christian liturgical period of Lent, and/or for the now seemingly interminable time of COVID and its associated ‘lockdowns’. I offer it to The Park Bench in the hope that it might have some resonance today for some of its readers in terms either of its allusions to the Christian liturgical period of Lent, and/or for the now seemingly interminable time of COVID and its associated ‘lockdowns’.

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FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS

‘The Spirit made him go into the desert, where he stayed forty days being tempted by Satan. Wild animals were there also, but angels came and helped him.’ (Mark 1 v. 12-13)

I am in the wilderness.
Jesus was here too;
Tempted forty days and forty nights.

The devil is here.
And is tempting me not with what might yet be
But with flotsam and jetsam of things that are past;
With echoes and memories in corridors of time,
With swirling reminders of what might have been
In broken ambitions and mockery of dreams

‘So you thought you could cope
And what did you find?
Is your God in your present
Or just in your mind?’

In the stillness and silence
At breaking of day
Comes the voice of the Lord
And what does it say?

It says:
‘Take all these whisperings from the hours of the night
And bring them in trust to the warmth of the light,
And then through these phantoms you surely will find
A God in your present and a peace in your mind.’

Paul Weller (1987)