The Day of Saints - Day 36, Piran

Unable to access the parish church at Perranzabuloe, even on my second attempt, I set off in the rain to visit what purports to be St Piran's Oratory, amid the Pendene sands. An hour of walking through soaking rain, and the visit was done, and so was I, retiring to a drier place.

The diesel shunter, St Piran, outside Penzance.

Legend has it that Piran's mother swallowed a falling star when he was born. Whether that was a good or bad omen, I am not sure, but his story continues with him being tied to a millstone and hurled into the Irish sea, only for those who did it to see the rock and it's occupant float up and off towards Cornwall where it ran aground at Perranzabuloe. Whilst I am not very practices at working with images, a phrase that I had earlier noted from an Evelyn Underhill book on Christian Mysticism - 'consciousness... attached like a limpet to the rock of the obvious' came back to me, and I thought I could use it for Piran's story. I also remembered that I had been reading a book with the title, 'From the Bottom of The Pool', again on meditation and prayer. Along with this, another observation from Mark Oakley's excellent, The Splash of Words, also helped. Marcel Proust once wrote that, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Coupled with plenty of puns, cosmos related words and some crustacean anatomy, I put together the following, which also makes a reflection on our struggle to let go of security, and though imagining or hoping we wer made for greater things we fear moving to find it:

FOR PIRAN

Patella Vulgaris

I have been a limpet clinging to the rock of the obvious,

I was made to hang on in the teeth of the gale.

It was said that my birth was a disaster,

And that when those waters broke,

My mother caught it in the mouth,

But I was never sure.

My ideas, fixed as they were, hurled down,

I am more conscious of my life, clamped,

Staring out into the impossible space,

Of moving immutability,

Knot tied to the tide.

This world is round and flat,

An igneous backbone,

Wheeling in the chaos,

It turns on me, and I on it,

And thus I am walled in,

A cowering sack of flaccid flesh.

Waiting, lashed repeatedly, I discover,

My millstone, and it becomes a shell,

Around, and upon which I gently rock,

Or at least go limping, between me,

and some harder place.

Losing it, looking above,

I am carried beneath,

Into the rock pool black,

Where flower on flower,

Blooms bright inside a crevice,

of low constellated light.

[Still here. ]

Still here.

Then, if there are more limpid eyes to have,

If, then float me free, my heart,

Muscles, viscera, glands, until,

All beyond these tiny grains,

Maybe even these roped ganglions,

Can see and feel you, wave.

Then, I will lift,

One foot off the ground,

I will leap,

And I will thrust myself forth unto you,

And I will go with your flow,

And I will pray for sticking power.

A castaway, a concentred speck,

Casting away, now, into a rôle,

Deeper than a wormhole,

I start, and bite down,

Hard on sea,

Able there to gasp... sound,

Before running aground,

A foundling, arriving,

Washed shore to find,

Among the stars,

Beyond them,

I am known.

Still here, somehow,

And motioned to rest,

I see myself gripped being,

Held firm and meant to know,

And so,

With that,

Feeling newly secured,

For dear life, I hang on -

Only from now on it will be,

'upon this rock',

I am found,

Obviously.

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