Psalm
You ok, sweetheart? What’s this, what’s this?
You lost someone, sweetheart? Your mum?
Where’s your mum, darling? You don’t think she’ll miss
you out here, in your ballet clothes? You come
with me, we’ll find your mum, it will
be ok, it will be. Is this your home?
No? Maybe we should wait until
she comes to find you. You know, try with
me to remember, what did she tell
you before you dropped in the undergrowth,
before I came up off the road,
heard the small bird, fluttering in your mouth?
It’s normal – hell, I’d be concerned –
but, you know, the thing is this:
you’re lost, right, but in the end
strangely love has appeared to us,
and looking back we’re in good hands.
But I know right now you can’t see this.
So I reckon we’ll just sit tight. That’s a plan.
Psalm is an unexpected poem in a first collection that often challenges expectations. Otherwise, by the Australian-born New Zealand poet John Dennison, delivers some keen landscape painting – local and international – but his project is not location. Family affections figure large, and he pays homage to the larger family of New Zealand’s major poets – James K Baxter, Allen Curnow, Ursula Bethell, among others. However, it’s the Northern Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, whose presence dominates these pages. Dennison has undoubtedly picked up some stylistic influences from Heaney. A more significant connection is that everyday scenes and emotions are mined for a spiritual meaning that can emerge from, not against, their sensuousness and everyday-ness. Perhaps Dennison goes farther in narrowing the options: his hunt for epiphany follows a specifically Christian route.
This orientation is something to bear in mind while reading Psalm out of context. Despite the title’s sizeable clue, the poem delivers a blinding shock. While its “voice” is an uneasy mix of heartiness and hesitancy, the tension is heightened by jerky line-breaks and mid-line halts. Cheesy endearments (“sweetheart”, “darling”) and awkward child-speak (“Where’s your mum …”) urge us to visit an instant judgment on the persona. He (presumably a man) can’t possibly be the saviour-figure he presents to the little girl. The particularity of the reference to her “ballet clothes,” and the immediate invitation, “you come with me” trigger ever-louder alarm bells.
So the title is easily forgotten: the text seems divorced from any zone of praise, or even “comfortable words”. But perhaps it’s the friction between the two that will provide eventual illumination.
The poem is an unrelenting monologue. We’re not party to any of the child’s replies: the impression is that she’s just too upset for verbalisation. Throughout, there’s only the man’s blurted encouragements and disjointed thinking-aloud, evolving and shifting from creepy to kindly, sensible to slightly mad.
As the voice continues it accumulates oddity. It tells us that the child has “dropped in the undergrowth”, a phrase that, magnified by the image of “the small bird, fluttering in your mouth” works against the earlier realism, and suggests the biblical sparrow whose fall is never disregarded by God. Then there’s the sudden exclamation, “It’s normal – hell, I’d be concerned” - a moment of self-talk, but nonetheless disconcerting. It seems a confused stab at, well, normalisation. Although we’re not told anything specific, there seems to be a new dimension opening, in which alarming events are potentially explicable and menace loses its sting.
Revelation doesn’t exactly dawn, but it hovers in the assertion that “… in the end// strangely love has appeared to us,/ and looking back we’re in good hands.” The earlier, suspiciously confident and paternal tone seems to have been replaced by the voice of someone who has submitted his own dubious authority to a superior power (“we’re in good hands”) and who has levelled – in both senses – with the child. This “love” might still attract a sinister interpretation were it not for the connection of “love’s appearance” with the language of the Nativity.
By the end of the poem I find the biblical associations have got clearer. In the scenario presented, immediate rescue isn’t possible, so man and child must both “sit tight”. The inference, the theme of so many of the Psalms, is that there’s sometimes no choice but to trust and wait in hope. Dennison’s parable has taught us, on our nerve-endings, just how difficult trust can be, and how reflexive is the impulse to its opposite.
What’s in a title? Some poem titles are no more than embellishment. This one casts an essential light that brightens and liberates the whole piece. Without it, or without faith in it, the narrative and our distrust would be grimly handcuffed. Its presence allows us to grant the speaker a reprieve. Starting off as a suspect paedophile, he ends as a kind of prophet; no miracle worker, but able to offer the lost and needy his visions of a past that makes sense and a future worth waiting for. The child herself represents the lost “children” of Exodus and beyond, exiles who will one day cease to weep, and begin to sing with the Psalmist, “Thou hast turned my mourning into dancing.”
