After the Chorus

Words: Rev'd Jon Swales

Music Pixabay: Piano Lament

After the Chorus/After the Noise

I wrote this travelling by train through the Alps from Rome to Paris, after reading John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” 

These two poems trace a movement from the triggered body, where worship can still feel like threat yet there still,  despite numbing and distance, is a desire for encounter. 

I. After the Chorus

Do not come to me now  

as soft advice.

Not as the bright smile  

at the church door.  

Not as the chorus swelling  

through the speakers,  

all uplift  

and upward hands.

The room is singing  

its predictable liturgy —  

the slow one,  

the anthem,  

the key change meant  

to lift the heart —

and something in me  

locks.

The body remembers  

what the mouth  

still cannot say.

One chord,  

and the old rooms open.

The brand.  

The corporate style.  

The lanyards.  

The smoothness of it all.

Words weaponised  

like daggers:

‘you bring nothing of value  

to this place.’

And suddenly I am back there,  

inside the room  

where harm was done  

and called itself ministry.

So come like weather.

Come like rain  

against the chapel windows  

when the singing grows too loud,  

when joy itself  

feels like threat.

Break the locked places.

There are pews inside me  

still occupied by ghosts,  

whole liturgies of fear  

recited in the blood,  

old shames hanging there  

like vestments  

in the dark.

I have called it resilience.  

I have called it faith.  

I have called it carrying on.

Still the walls sweat.

Still the heart,  

that small battered flat  

above the old sanctuary,  

lets in every echo  

except peace.

So come not as guest  

but as the one  

who knows the building  

was never theirs.

Kick in the swollen door.

Shatter the stained glass  

of the god they handed me —  

the one who looked too much  

like power,  

too much like control,  

too much like men  

who mistook harm  

for holiness.

Burn what must burn.

The false shepherd.  

The polished liturgy.  

The songs that ask the wounded  

to rise too quickly.

Batter my heart,  

threefold mercy,  

Father of the bruised,  

Christ of the locked room,  

Wild Goose moving  

not in the amplifier’s roar  

but in the tremor beneath it.

Undo me.

Not as they undid me.

Not to wound  

but to make room  

for breath.

For I have been  

an occupied city,  

streets patrolled by fear,  

every chorus a siren,  

every bridge lifted in worship  

a trigger.