"Slaughtered, ma'am?"
"Please."
Dead or alive. That's your choice here. Not free-range or buy-one-get-one-free; not RSPCA monitored or corn-fed. Fresh, at least, is a given.
So my poultry man does his dreadful deed and wipes up afterwards with a wodge of wing. I hand over cash and make a mental note: next time bring exact money. The bloodied change puts me off my tea.
Cooking time is shorter here: the bird's still warm as it hits the pot.
Guestz meanz meat so in this season of new life I have been responsible for the killing of two broilers. But life seems to be winning the day. The gauze of thin green over the grey has given way to a plush carpet of leaf and grass. Trees are no longer blushing pink but fully fledged and growing fruit. Mammals abound. A man, embracing a baby goat, a baby girl and a lit cigarette, greets me on my way to school. Something tells me he is happy. Indeed there are cries of the young of both the species he holds emanating from the homes and gardens all along my track.
We celebrate spring with a jolted drive through the mountains processing up the highway - the aisle through our colossal Easter cathedral - built mainly by men from China believing Blake that, 'great things are done when men and mountains meet,' but extrapolating, 'and greater things where machines and mountains meet.' So they set their faces as flint and their feet apart and hold huge drills poked into the sides of mountains so solid, so steep and towering I tremble just to look at them. The trembling of these men with plastic hats and audacity has a more tangible cause. Then, they simply scoop up the rubble to which the the rock-face is reduced and tip it down the hill. At other places they employ brick layers to build walls to separate road from mountain and I wonder what they'd say if asked as Job was,
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?...
Who determined its measurements - surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
Or who laid its cornerstone,
When the morning stars sang together...?
"Please."
Dead or alive. That's your choice here. Not free-range or buy-one-get-one-free; not RSPCA monitored or corn-fed. Fresh, at least, is a given.
So my poultry man does his dreadful deed and wipes up afterwards with a wodge of wing. I hand over cash and make a mental note: next time bring exact money. The bloodied change puts me off my tea.
Cooking time is shorter here: the bird's still warm as it hits the pot.
Guestz meanz meat so in this season of new life I have been responsible for the killing of two broilers. But life seems to be winning the day. The gauze of thin green over the grey has given way to a plush carpet of leaf and grass. Trees are no longer blushing pink but fully fledged and growing fruit. Mammals abound. A man, embracing a baby goat, a baby girl and a lit cigarette, greets me on my way to school. Something tells me he is happy. Indeed there are cries of the young of both the species he holds emanating from the homes and gardens all along my track.
We celebrate spring with a jolted drive through the mountains processing up the highway - the aisle through our colossal Easter cathedral - built mainly by men from China believing Blake that, 'great things are done when men and mountains meet,' but extrapolating, 'and greater things where machines and mountains meet.' So they set their faces as flint and their feet apart and hold huge drills poked into the sides of mountains so solid, so steep and towering I tremble just to look at them. The trembling of these men with plastic hats and audacity has a more tangible cause. Then, they simply scoop up the rubble to which the the rock-face is reduced and tip it down the hill. At other places they employ brick layers to build walls to separate road from mountain and I wonder what they'd say if asked as Job was,
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?...
Who determined its measurements - surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
Or who laid its cornerstone,
When the morning stars sang together...?
Job 38:4-7
It was no man who built this monumental mountain range, neither in a Great Chinese Leap Forward, nor in a cathedral-building Middle Age. My school infants don't know this. I watch them take inspiration and have a go themselves at attaining to the lofty heights in the sandpit. They share out sand and shovel undeterred even by their brethren with a different game, the looting and pillaging of said sand. They pile up bucketfuls higher than their heads. I fear for the day they will attend sir's science class and hear just how many geological ages it takes to make a mountain and just how many years it takes to make a geological age. They will lay down their little tools and lament the brevity of life - oh, how like grass we are, which is here today and is tomorrow thrown into the fire - and the brevity of playtime in particular.
We live in the place that the Earth's crust was freed from the underworld, where it pushed its way up and out so its strata of many colours could fill the sky with its earthy rainbows. Here rocks, redeemed, seem to rejoice in their roller coaster lines, folds of tectonic plate forced into looping the loop. Ther
e are crazy patterns: zebra stripes, zig-zag cracks and jagged edges. A generous jeweller has set slabs of silvered stone one on top of the other and decorated chunks with rust-red ribbon and fine white filament. Ten thousand purple tinged fingers point out of one cliff face, another is jigsawed into cubes and cuboids, fractured but perfectly stacked to the sky. Truly the earth has felt the breeze on its brow and enjoyed the rain and river on its back but the elements have aged it. It is cracked, chapped and gnarled.
"We squeeze the earth," boasts the SCO advert painted on one rock. Adequate though your phone and net services may be, SCO, I'm thinking its not you that's done all this.
I prefer the reverence in the word emblazoned on every vehicle, 'Mashallah', praise God for beauty. It prints what's in our hearts and on our lips, its long letters in the middle, Alifs and Lam, seeming to raise it upwards, even as it pushes on ahead, on the windscreen.
Like the architecture of minsters where many will have gathered that day, everything - even the sand left by glaciers, bearing aloft boulders - stretches through the skies, straining for the celestial.
Night falls and plunges us into solid-state formlessness and void. We creep round towers of blackness and avoid the abyss below. Then we turn round the corner of a mountain. The stone is rolled away and there is the moon, full, like a piercing through to a brighter place, like light at the end of a tunnel.
There's been a resurrection. There is light at the end of the tunnel.
We live in the place that the Earth's crust was freed from the underworld, where it pushed its way up and out so its strata of many colours could fill the sky with its earthy rainbows. Here rocks, redeemed, seem to rejoice in their roller coaster lines, folds of tectonic plate forced into looping the loop. Ther
e are crazy patterns: zebra stripes, zig-zag cracks and jagged edges. A generous jeweller has set slabs of silvered stone one on top of the other and decorated chunks with rust-red ribbon and fine white filament. Ten thousand purple tinged fingers point out of one cliff face, another is jigsawed into cubes and cuboids, fractured but perfectly stacked to the sky. Truly the earth has felt the breeze on its brow and enjoyed the rain and river on its back but the elements have aged it. It is cracked, chapped and gnarled."We squeeze the earth," boasts the SCO advert painted on one rock. Adequate though your phone and net services may be, SCO, I'm thinking its not you that's done all this.
I prefer the reverence in the word emblazoned on every vehicle, 'Mashallah', praise God for beauty. It prints what's in our hearts and on our lips, its long letters in the middle, Alifs and Lam, seeming to raise it upwards, even as it pushes on ahead, on the windscreen.
Like the architecture of minsters where many will have gathered that day, everything - even the sand left by glaciers, bearing aloft boulders - stretches through the skies, straining for the celestial.
Night falls and plunges us into solid-state formlessness and void. We creep round towers of blackness and avoid the abyss below. Then we turn round the corner of a mountain. The stone is rolled away and there is the moon, full, like a piercing through to a brighter place, like light at the end of a tunnel.
There's been a resurrection. There is light at the end of the tunnel.
