John Agard first poet to receive the BookTrust's Lifetime Achievement Award
The BookTrust's Lifetime Achievement Award presented to John Agard on 9 November 2021; interviews with John Agard for the BookTrust, The Verb, Start the Week & the FT...
web called life. Yes, he’s thinking to himself what next?
Maybe I’ll modernise my Guide for the Perplexed.
A Jew writing of the perplexed in classical Arabic
(even a ghost) can perplex both ends of Orthodox stick.
The thing is to couch your words in the prophetic.
From Jerusalem to the seat of Damascus,
eagles of steel shall come swarming like locusts
and weeping shall sound from the stones and the dust.
Strike a sphinx-like tone, keep the believers guessing.
They’ll soon be falling at your feet for a blessing.
Failing that, turn to the art of jesting.
So say to the charity-givers, give without a fuss.
Let donors learn from the best poets among us.
In short, let your giving be anonymous.
Risk a beheading, at best a barrage of boos.
But that’s how believers express their views
when they hear the truth told slantingly true.
Say to thy tongue, old Maimonides suggests,
say to thy tongue I don’t know, and thou shalt progress.
Then he crosses his Isaiah fingers while holding his breath.
Having no reason to disbelieve divine reason,
he thinks this too will come to pass – the fanatic’s season.
Then again how long is a piece of string, how long?
Some rabbis with beards as grey as their Torah
may regard this apparition as a heresy-sower –
a sort of crossover Biblical whistle-blower.
How trust a man who learns from whirling Sufis
and mixes God’s word with scientific theories
picked up from ones who face Mecca on their knees?
How can silence be prayer and darkness light?
How compare Jacob’s dream with Muhammad’s flight,
when no ladder’s the same as another, ain’t that right?
A rabbi like him of eagle-eyed renown
should be rooting for the messianic march of Zion.
Tell us, Maimonides, whose side are you on?
And he who by acronym was aka Rambam
would recall the golden age of medieval Islam
when Jew and Muslim breathed in one breath of Adam.
And he who was physician to the sultan of Cairo,
and neither considered the other as high or as low,
now contemplates on the telly – an inferno
rising from an apocalypse of breaking news.
But when bilingual bombs speak Arabic and Hebrew,
should he answer to Moses or Abu Musa ibn Maymun?
Ah, for those days beside Cordoba’s olives,
when the most perplexed mind knew the meaning of live.
And both rabbi and imam could spell forgive.
*
Ghost Under Surveillance
Ghosts, as we know, have their own sartorial sense,
so this time round (as a sort of theological joke)
I thought I’d don the Sufi’s woollen cloak,
swop my turban for a rabbi’s black fedora,
and feed the Koran with the spoon of the Torah.
So placing to my lips my trumpet of Joshua’s,
pausing between notes of messianic suras,
I did my impression of a whirling dervish.
City folk threw me coins, thinking I was homeless,
while some of the multitude cried heretic.
When word got out my nickname was Rambam,
they asked: ‘Is he of rabbi kin or a disguised imam?’
‘A physician of the soul,’ I Rambam replied.
So what if this body be a synagogue or a mosque?
Both East and West know blood’s alphabet of loss.
And so what if I pray three times a day, or five?
In the throat of silence God’s syllables thrive.
*
The Jester’s Eureka Moment
How do you fuse
a Muslim and a Jew into one?
is a question the jester
would many a day brood on
as he squatted on his futon.
At last – a win-win solution.
Since flesh dwelleth in the Word,
I’ll start by changing my name
to Abdul Abdullah Goldberg,
or simply Suleyman Solomon
and under my yarmulke dome
to holy Mecca I shall roam
seeking kaaba in kabbalah
as I do my salaam shalom
from dusk onto dawn.
May the mind’s credos be exiled
from the orchard of my heart.
And may Yahweh and Allah smile
as I whirl down the aisle
with my chosen gentile.
And when reckoning day comes
and this jester bursts into atoms
for being one of God’s scapegoats,
may yours truly be timely bombed,
not by one side, but by both.
And from folly’s ever-blossoming bed,
let wisdom regather itself bud by bud.
Of course, easier said than done,
when dogma wags the mind by the tail
and heart forgets the scent of the frail.
Contents List
11 The Return of Perplexed Maimonides
13 Ghost Under Surveillance
14 Bundles of Omens
15 I Come to Bring Not Peace but a Sword
16 Bandages
17 Maimonides Discourses on the One
18 The Jester’s Eureka Moment
19 The Jester’s Postwar Reflection
20 A Widow Speaks of Five
21 I Am the Bread of Life
22 The Jester’s Spoonful
23 Belated Letter from Maimonides to Richard the Lion Heart, explaining why he declined the offer to be the King of England’s Royal Physician
25 Maimonides Discourses on the Spiritual Perks of the Physician
27 Maimonides Discourses on the Almighty’s Lack of Tastebuds
28 Maimonides Discourses on the iPhone God
29 Maimonides Discourses on the Via Negativa
30 Maimonides Discourses on Prayer
31 The Jester Weighs his Words
32 Voice
33 Maimonides Discourses on Prophecy
34 The Jester’s Version of Jonah
35 Maimonides Discourses on the Commandments
36 The Jester Confronts the Almighty on Separating the Sheep from the Goat
37 Frog on the Brink
38 A Senior Moment
39 Maimonides Discourses on Figures of Speech
40 The Jester Embraces Etcetera
41 Maimonides Discourses on the Fifth of the Four Humours
42 The Jester Battles with Turning the Other Cheek
43 An Eye for an Eye and a Tooth for a Tooth?
44 Maimonides Discourses on Exercise
45 The Jester’s Alternative Gymnasium
46 The Jester Lectures on the Role of the Poet in Virtual Reality
47 Maimonides Discourses on Love at First Sight
48 Maimonides Discourses on the C-Word
49 The Jester Counts Every Day Blessed
50 Maimonides Discourses on the Gender Issue
51 The Jester Seeks a New Wife Synonym
52 The Jester Enters the Debate
53 Maimonides Discourses on Vanity Vanity All Is Vanity
54 The Jester’s Metaphysical Nursery Rhyme
55 Maimonides Discourses on the Messiah
56 The Adoration of Balthazar
57 The Jester Recalls How Frank Incense Met Myrrhtle
58 The Jester Unravels the Mortal Coil
59 The Jester’s Spin on the Quantum Leap
60 Maimonides Discourses on the Resurrection
61 Maimonides’ Afterlife Afterthoughts
Related Reviews
'John Agard's first book since he finally won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry is typically cosmopolitan, with one eye on the past and the other on the present...readers – especially schoolteachers and their pupils – tend to love his work... This thought-provoking, puckish, tender book will not disappoint them.' – Rory Waterman, Times Literary Supplement [on Travel Light Travel Dark]
‘John Agard's poetry is a wonderful affirmation of life, in a language that is as vital and joyous as we are able to craft it in the Caribbean, in spite of our history of distress’ – David Dabydeen
‘A unique and energetic force in contemporary British poetry, John Agard's poems combine acute social observation, puckish wit and a riotous imagination to thrilling effect' – Ben Wilkinson
‘His poems are direct and arresting, playful, full of startling imagery, and are hilarious, passionate and erotic as often as they are political – often managing to be all these things at once – Maura Dooley
‘The new poems create multiple entertaining voices, but they are also urgent fables for our time’ – Paula Burnett, Times Literary Supplement
‘A specialist in word trickery… Agard is one of our most consistent, culture-crossing spokesmen’ – Graeme Wright, Poetry Review.
‘One of the most eloquent contemporary poets…rich in literary and cultural allusion, yet as direct as a voice in the bus queue’ – Helen Dunmore, Observer