It comes to us by way of reader Bob Boldt. While this is not a poetry blog, BB is a good friend to this site, and I liked his insights here -- which come to us down a circuitous path first marked out by Geoffrey Chaucer. Besides, you can get a college education from his footnotes alone.
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Song of the April Fool
By Bob Boldt
“Whan that Aprille, with hise shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heath
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne
And smale foweles maken melodye
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages-
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunturbury they wende”
Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343 –1400) From Canterbury Tales
Lover of the devious
The hoax
And celebrator of the artful deception
I rarely pass an April’s first
Without some fool’s taking-in.
Today, there being no lack of this daily feed
Abundantly spread for friends and fools alike
I choose to make no new fraud
To add to that abundant store
But prefer instead to be this April
Behind those holy and profane
Pilgrims
Who brave the early spring storms
On the road to Canterbury.
Reading those song like rhymes
That sprung so joyfully from Chaucer’s heart
I find myself again at one
With all seekers of
Delight
Love
Healing
Forgiveness
Redemption
Ecstasy
Fornication
And
Adventure
On that road to Canterbury.
We who in our time have lost
Not only the connection to
The hurtling of our planet ‘round
The brilliant fire
That so rules worms and kings
But also any traffic with the preternatural
That is why this year
I pilgrimage back to the source
Seeking it in Canterbury
As our ancestors
And even our simian uncles knew
When future paths are blocked
By torrent and avalanche
It requires us to find older courses
That lead to green pastures
And maps that guide to ways
That reaffirm the roots
From which creation springs
And the clear sure voices of the gods.[1.]
Reluctantly we turn from
The superhighway and follow the
Barely legible sign that points
To Canterbury.
This magical pile of stones
Rests in gothic repose
In the center of a town of
Less than 50,000 souls
Still the hub of modern pilgrims
Who drawn like floating
Grains of iron to the magnet’s core
File half in wonder
Half in idle curiosity
Beneath the cathedral arches
In Canterbury.
There they marvel at the meddlesome priest’s
Foully martyred blood[2.]
And meditate on Augustine’s [3.]
First footfalls seeking
The pagan foundation tracings
Among the buttercups and the marigold
Surrounding the city of the new god
Of Canterbury
This pilgrimage is no retreat
But a gathering in
Of all that has been lost
In the mad rush for the
Distraction and constipation of
Power
Conquest
And
Greed
That now would make the earth a dung heap.
We pass beneath this
Architecture of praying stones
Not as a shuddering refuge
But as a doorway
A leading prospect that lies before us
A dedication to our lineage from
Lucy of Africa
To Lucy in the sky [4.]
We repose our pilgrimage beneath these stones
Not as a sanctuary so much as
A querencia [5.] from which to launch a
Future for our exalted little band of apes
Our holy duties done
We retrace our pious tracks
Back to a world transformed
By our pilgrimage to Canterbury.
Footnotes:
[1.] According to Julian Jaynes, “The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. consciousness, as we know it today, is a relatively new faculty, one that did not exist until as recently as 2000 B.C. To ancient man, God was not a mental image or a deified thought but an actual voice heard when one was presented with a situation requiring decisive action. http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf043/sf043p18.htm
[2.] St. Thomas Becket (c 1118 – December 29, 1170) was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 to 1170. He is venerated as a saint and martyr by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church. He engaged in a conflict with King Henry II over the rights and privileges of the Church and was assassinated by followers of the king in Canterbury Cathedral. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Becket
Henry’s exclamation "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" is said to be one of the earliest examples of plausible deniability and was interpreted by the assassins as an irrefutable, if indirect, royal command.
[3.] Augustine (not to be confused with the more famous Saint Augustine of Hippo - 354 – 430 CE) was the first Archbishop of Canterbury. he was sent to Ethelbert of Kent one of the Merovingian kings by Pope Gregory the Great in 597. Ethelbert himself was a pagan, but allowed his wife to worship God her own way. Probably under influence of his wife, Bertha, Ethelbert asked the Pope to send missionaries. The church of Canterbury was built on a site sacred since Roman times.
[4.] Lucy - Australopithecus afarensis Female 3.9 to 3 million years ago discovered in Ethiopia on November 30, 1974, near the Awash River by anthropologist Donald Johanson and one of his students, Tom Gray. Both were on the hot arid plains surveying the dusty terrain when a fossil caught Gray's eye; an arm bone fragment on a slope in a gulley. Near it lay a fragment from the back of a small skull. As they looked further, more and more bones were found, including jaw, arm bone, thighbone, ribs, and vertebrae. They carefully analyzed the partial skeleton and calculated that an amazing 40% of a hominin skeleton was recovered, which, while sounding generally unimpressive, is astounding in the world of anthropology. Usually, only fossil fragments are discovered; rarely are skulls or ribs found intact.
The skeleton AL 288-1 was nicknamed Lucy, after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which was played repeatedly on a tape recorder at the camp as they celebrated all night after finding the first bones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_%28Australopithecus%29
[5.] “In Spanish, la querencia refers to a place on the ground where one feels secure, a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn. It comes from the verb "querer", to desire, but this verb also carries the sense of accepting a challenge, as in a game. In Spain, querencia is most often used to describe the spot in a bullring where a wounded bull goes to gather himself, the place he returns to after his painful encounters with the picadors and the banderilleros. It is unfortunate that the word is compromised in this way; for the idea itself is quite beautiful – a place in which we know exactly who we are. The place from which we speak our deepest beliefs. Querencia conveys more than “hearth”. And it carries this sense of being challenged – in the case of a bullfight, by something lethal, which one may want no part of. I would like to take this word querencia beyond its ordinary meaning and suggest that it applies to our challenge in the modern world, that our search for a querencia is both a response to threat and a desire to find out who we are. And the discovery of a querencia, I believe, hinges on the perfection of a sense of place.”
Barry Lopez, The Rediscovery of North America, p39-40
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