大象传媒

Following the devastating fire at Notre- Dame, the Booker Prize winner Ben Okri has written a poem, especially for Broadcasting House, in praise of the cathedral, its spirit, and the muscle and faith that built it.

After requests from listeners to hear it again, and with Ben's permission, we have posted it in full:

Notre Dame is telling us something.
How the Orioles weep.
Something in our soul is burning.
Those alchemical flames the flesh
Of the mother are devouring.
Turbulence in the streets;
Rotating anger in the air.
Division across the seas;
Swans of peace living in fear.
Above, the earth dwindles
As mercury consumes the teeth
Of the young and chemicals
Plough the guts of children
Before the seeds of death are planted.
No prayers anywhere.
Angels have fallen like tears;
The winding stairs lead nowhere.
And in Europe the bells are ringing
For a dark angelus where faith has gone
Underground and a dark mass of unbelief
Stalks the stables and the high tables.
Notre Dame is telling us something
About the wisdom beyond grief.
We fight over cabbages while the spirit
Of things is perishing in open view.
In alchemy only when things burn
Are things made true and new.
The orioles are weeping
For the dwindling of our souls
And the smallness of the goals
That obscure the cathedrals
And the good laws and the little progress
We have made from wars
To civil liberties, from the comfort
Of our parish minds to the generosity
Of our linked hands.
O the orioles are weeping
For the wars that will be fought
Because of the simple things not taught
Like the underlying unity
And our fundamental trinity
And how when the way is lost
All good things perish
And we will never know the cost.
Notre Dame is telling us something
In its flames and its fallen spire
We have been sinking lower
Mesmerised by lies, destroying truth
Instead of rising higher.
Everything that wrenches our hearts
Like signs written in the sky
With unearthly hands
Are inscriptions to our times
That with wise eyes we should read.
Our souls are starving, our hearts grow cold
The young are either climate-fighting
Or are in quiet despair perishing
While on islands empire-nostalgia
Secretly and not so secretly obsesses the old.
Our politics keeps looking back
To something that never was or has gone
Rather than embracing the present
Like the dawn's nightingale song
Or the things that we all lack.
Notre Dame is telling something
About the holes into which we are falling
Seeking power seeking power
Losing meaning in the falling tower.
The spire touching the sky
Inclined our eyes up high,
Led us upward to our best selves.
Maybe in these falling times
While a dim bell across Europe chimes,
That fallen spire will re-unite us
Beyond the greed of our separate ways
Back to pilgrim roads and singing days.
They are singing Ave Marias
Outside burning Notre Dame
And across the world we are perhaps
Remembering how fine we can be
In the symphony of our deeds
And the harmony of our needs
For whether it is the Buddhas
Of Bamiyan or Grenfell's cladding
Or that home of alchemy and grace
In Paris burning, it is us who burn too,
And the loss is the unborn child's
And the beggar in Timbuktu
All culture is shared
Beneath the realm
Of sleep and awakening.
Notre Dame is telling us something.
Awake, man, awake.
Awake, woman, awake.
Flames are spreading in our every sleep.
Flames of the earth.
Flames of the future.
Sky-flames
Polar-flames.
Truth-flames.
Orioles are weeping.
Bells are ringing.
Why are you still sleeping?