‘Michael’: A Poem by Martin Briggs

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Michael

Michael, heaven’s handsomest,
most decorated strategist
and highest-ranking officer,
having vanquished Lucifer
was faced with long-term unemployment.
Seeking worthwhile redeployment,
this veteran of celestial strife
settled for civilian life:

as mainstay of the Heavenly City,
he now directs the Doom Committee.
Hence, before the judgement seat
in his best wings, to meet and greet,
weigh souls and seal their destiny,
he takes position, solemnly
posts seraphim on every gate,
details four trumpeters, and waits.

Crypts burst open, tombs erupt
and mankind, bleary, incorrupt,
forsakes the temporary loam
for a last, abiding, home.
Heroes, doers of the right,
lovers, seekers after light,
may wriggle through the needle’s eye
to happiness that does not die;

but rats cast into Satan’s pit
shall never know the last of it.
Agnostic bishops, worldly priors,
libidinous apostate friars,
heretics, lapsed Methodists,
sheepish red-faced atheists,
all rise naked from the clay,
called to account on Judgement Day;

practitioners of all known sins,
tin-pot dictators, despot kings,
politicians, money-mongers,
swindlers, mobsters, those among us
thriving on abuse of power,
all condemned this dreadful hour
with crooked cops, debauched footballers,
fare evaders, nuisance callers,

blighters, rotters, cads, bad sports,
braggarts, bores of every sort,
garrulous poeticules,
founders of post-modern schools,
critics, arbiters of art
who said they had our taste at heart—
all sink the scale and, roundly damned,
slink away on God’s left hand.

From all this eschatology
I turn aside uneasily.
There’s something fixed in Michael’s stare
that follows people everywhere
and I’d describe as threatening.
This angel of our reckoning,
this painted menace, seems to see.
Why won’t he take his eyes off me?

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Poet’s Note: Rogier van der Weyden’s polyptych of The Last Judgement (c 1450), which inspired this poem, was commissioned for the Hôtel-Dieu, Beaune, Burgundy, where it is still housed.

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Martin Briggs lives in Suffolk, England. He only began writing in earnest after retiring from a career in public administration, since when he has been published in various publications on both sides of the Atlantic.