Burying Mike Bransfield

Tears, the whimper-rumbling kind

that straddle the Korean volcano of the heart,

eddied through the church, building to an awful

moment. Would the eruption come? No,

ritual carried the day: incense, Holy Water and

malssŭms – a lot of malssŭms –

lulled us into everlasting rest in the

buxom bosom of the Lord!

And then, a voice, croaky

and foreign, cut the platitudes.

We’ve lost a brother, it said;

we lost him a long time ago;

we lost him to the Korean people.

For long we didn't understand.

But we’ve come, we’ve seen, we understand.

And we have our peace!

Passing(In memory of Sean Quinn)

Standing on that plateau, close to the sky,

as Big Sean joined his dust to a foreign kind,

I felt weighted to the ground,

too oppressed to cry.

But the sudden intercalation in the Korean service

of a Gaelic prayer – bas gan bas – bridged

half a world and eons of time;

tears circled my eyes.

Mystery

When big Sean died, a man from Pusan said:

I remember him well,

he spoke good Chinese.

Sean's Korean was hands

and the back of his nose;

his English was eyes and ripples all over.

But whatever the mysteries

of his language skills,

you knew it when he was and wasn't pleased.

Good Friday: After a Poem by an Old Master(In memory of Phil Crosbie)

The day he left

spring roots stirred

in the town where he spent his life.

Holy Week in Hongch’ŏn,

crystal clean, not a mote.

At the perfect time

a subtle fragrance rode the evening breeze.

The flower lives. For those of us who served with him

the broken bread remains forever.

Purest Celadon(In Memory of Hub Hayward)

We mourn the passing

of one of the last of the greats,

a misshapen pot aesthetically,

but fired at a temperature

that moulded man, message and Church

into a vessel of singular grace.

Purest celadon,

fashioned from first Columban clay,

his memory assuages the pain of his going.

‘I work for God,’ he said,

‘not for any secular power.’

He smelled of pineapples and creme de cacao.

Even in death his name evokes a smile.