When the eagle lived on Cheviot and swung
In his large orbit, the Kingdom of Northumbria
Turned under his eyes; the hunched-up
Hills at the border, the rivers gouging
Their dales Eastbound towards the North Sea –
Terrible sometimes, beautiful also, bearing
A traffic of commerce and even-handedly
A cargo of death.
Adamant, limestone, sandstone, shale, peat,
The layers of lettered history.
Faith puts down roots to a depth beyond
The Romans marched from the South, consul
And centurion in massed phalanx, harvesting
The last of Europe, sowing the syntax
Of their language, planting the land
Thick with laws, building the house of order.
The Wall marked out their sovereignty,
Strode across the crowded hills enclosing
The Roman Peace, forbidding chaos.
Faith is discipline and the order of life. Faith is obedience.
From the West the monks travelled gently,
Working through the valleys towards the Island;
Cutting “peace” on the doorsteps, Aidan and Cuthbert,
Shod with the Good News; Bede conning the Gospel
To the last; but knowing also
The ways of foxes and how the ducks managed
And the cormorant and the puffin in the November hurricanes.
Faith is prayer in the teeth of God’s worst weather.
Faith is quiet places.
Norsemen in long ships from the unmapped Eastern
Ocean swooped, nosing with iron beaks
Into the inlets and small harbours;
Seeking cattle and women and the monks’ treasures;
Laying the Kingdom waste, yet coming
Again and again over depths and reaches,
Which the whale owns and the stormy petrel
And the doom-laden albatross.
Faith is diving against the wind
In contrary seas.
Faith is courage.
Over the unmanned frontier, to and fro,
Crossing and re-crossing, the Border Reivers
Came in their steel bonnets; fire and broadsword,
Ruin and devastation, waste.
Preserving all the same their stock
Even in death’s maelstrom: Robson and Fenwick,
Armstrong, Forster and Musgrave.
Faith is to name
And to be named.
Under the skin of the moor, in the groin
Of the fell, other rich spoils
Lay, age-long hidden: lead, iron, coal.
Down they went, the colliers, into the sombre
Galleries to loosen the gleaming, treacherous
Seams, by flickering candle-light first, later
In the pits grand and perilous, the Rising Sun,
The Isabella, and the Dean and Chapter.
Faith is to work in the dark. Faith is risk.
For those who go down to the sea in ships,
Welder and caulkers bent their backs, wielding
Hammer and blow-torch, shaping the steel
To rise in the staithes and swoop down the slipway;
Liner, destroyer, collier, freighter, tramp:
Mauritania, Newcastle, Esso Northumbria,
Easing between the piers into the element
of tiderace and countercurrent, the fathoms of God.
‘O hear us when we call to thee
For those in peril…’
Faith is to be adrift in a small ship in a squall,
And know it unsinkable.
Mostly gone now, all that; what comes next
is from, perhaps, above; is symbol and soundbyte
Snatched or filtered out of the crinkled airwaves,
And rebuilt around us, shadows and solidifying
Into realities; old times are gone, it seems to say,
Existence is information, begin afresh.
Faith is to carry the past
Alive in to the present.
Faith is the future.
Kevin Nichols