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A New Concordance

Lord's Prayer 1662


1.
Naturally, it’s ‘Our’ and ‘Father’,
don’t we all agree?
The seed outrules the womb.

That ‘which’ instead of ‘who’ may be
a godly lapse of grammar.
And surely ‘heaven’’s best for looking

up at, not within.
‘Hallowed’’s quite an adjective,
seriously soft and sacred.

‘Thy kingdom’ has been slow to come
although those first reciters thought
it might arrive next week.

And does free ‘will’ survive in heaven?
‘Our daily bread’’s a bit like welfare,
not quite protestant.

‘Trespasses’ suggests a sign.
Trespassers Will Be Forgiven.
‘Temptation’ has a range of smells,

some more troublesome than others.
Is high self-righteousness a starter?
‘Evil’ is a whiff we know

although philosophers may differ.
Theocracies feed hard upon it.
And then that final declaration,

added later, it would seem,
its anapaests dancing away into space.
‘For ever and ever’. Will that mean

the heat death of the universe
out there at the end of all our
radiant acceleration?

2.
And yet one hears the Aramaic,
those first few dusty murmurings
followed by the koine Greek.

One hears the rhythms changing, up
or down with new translations,
and feels a new momentum as

it moves from mouth to mouth.



Geoff Page is based in Canberra. His recent books include 1953 (UQP 2013), Improving the News (Pitt Street Poetry 2013), New Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann 2013) and Aficionado: A Jazz Memoir (Picaro Press 2014). He has also edited The Best Australian Poems (Black Inc) for 2014 and 2015.