Choir Practice (Poetry)

The Cathedral close grows lively with a babbling stream of boys
who populate the evening with their youthful art of noise —
raucous and discordant in the neighbourhood of Him
who sees their transformation to unlikely cherubim.

For once inside the vestry they cast off loud streetwise airs
and don tradition’s image like their innocent forebears,
the whiteness of each surplice as the dress rehearsal starts,
a testament to purity retuning wayward hearts.

They file into the choir stalls as though butter wouldn’t melt,
their pink complexions glowing, His almighty presence felt
in the organ’s old world thunder as its gushing music flows
and sweet girlish lips are puckered to a multitude of “O”s.

The voices rise, their blending like a rare bouquet of wine
unbottled in the stillness with a breath of the divine,
and the senses reel in wonder when a string of perfect notes
pours its benediction from pre-adolescent throats.

The building fills with glory — a receptacle of sound —
that washes through its stonework where the centuries compound,
soaking up their choral singing, liquid-cool their Latin lines
show a tidemark of devotion in our godforsaken times.

Once the final chords have faded and the echoes, too, have drained,
the vast emptiness hangs, poignant, its fresh vacancy explained
by the exodus of angels, reverting, one by one,
back to ordinary children, metamorphosis undone.