If I Should Die (1989)

THE WORLD IS A STRANGELY SMALL PLACE AND IF ONE DOES NOT THINK OF POLITICAL BOUNDARIES AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCES THEN IT BECOMES EASY TO COLLECTIVELY REFER TO WHOLE PEOPLES AS ONE CATHOLIC AND ANIMATED ENTITY.
THE WORD EMPIRE, KINDGOM AND UNION ILLUSTRATES SUCH AN ENTITY. ONE VISIONARY 1900 YEARS AGO PROCLAIMED IT AS THE KINGDOM OF GOD. ITS NATURE HUMAN, ITS MYSTERY DIVINE. THUS:


If I should die, I die a catholic first:
My life a play, my simplest thoughts a verse.
The dreams, faith, hopes quietly nursed
Might, mistaken seem ageless;
Immortality a call of thirst
Should suddenly, mightily burst.
Redeem a soul from the curse,
Gild an effigy with ashen dust;
Feeble these senses must
Labour the heaviest task:
Document thought, deed, emotion past
Realize the littleness of vast
A shapeless mould cast
Love’s furnace, inflame, passion’s blast
Mettle glazed to last
Reveals my spirited lust
Rambles, punctuates my play thus.


6 oktober 1989

While sitting in early Autumn in front of the Habsburg Palace, Wien
(Vienna, Austria). It was also from the foyer balcony of this very palace where Hitler returned to the land of his birth as dictator-ruler of the Third Reich, and addressed the people as victor and liberator. The film of the event that survives and is sometimes replayed in documentaries, is so stark that you cannot immediately associate it with the sereneness of this place. Perhaps, all storms do erupt somewhat from serenity.

Some aspects of the sonnet represents great personal importance, by way of its confessionary nature, to me. It is beyond denial that the concept was inspired by Rupert C. Brooke’s excellent if idealistic War Sonnets.