Send us Fan Mail Words: Rev'd Jon Swales Music Pixabay: Piano Lament After the Chorus/After the Noise I wrote this travelling by train through the Alps from Rome to Paris, after reading John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” These two poems trace a movement from the triggered body, where worship can still feel like threat yet there still, despite numbing and distance, is a desire for encounter. I. After the Chorus Do not come to me now as soft advice. Not as the bright smile at the church door. Not as the chorus swelling through the speakers, all uplift and upward hands. The room is singing its predictable liturgy — the slow one, the anthem, the key change meant to lift the heart — and something in me locks. The body remembers what the mouth still cannot say. One chord, and the old rooms open. The brand. The corporate style. The lanyards. The smoothness of it all. Words weaponised like daggers: ‘you bring nothing of value to this place.’ And suddenly I am back there, inside the room where harm was done and called itself ministry. So come like weather. Come like rain against the chapel windows when the singing grows too loud, when joy itself feels like threat. Break the locked places. There are pews inside me still occupied by ghosts, whole liturgies of fear recited in the blood, old shames hanging there like vestments in the dark. I have called it resilience. I have called it faith. I have called it carrying on. Still the walls sweat. Still the heart, that small battered flat above the old sanctuary, lets in every echo except peace. So come not as guest but as the one who knows the building was never theirs. Kick in the swollen door. Shatter the stained glass of the god they handed me — the one who looked too much like power, too much like control, too much like men who mistook harm for holiness. Burn what must burn. The false shepherd. The polished liturgy. The songs that ask the wounded to rise too quickly. Batter my heart, threefold mercy, Father of the bruised, Christ of the locked room, Wild Goose moving not in the amplifier’s roar but in the tremor beneath it. Undo me. Not as they undid me. Not to wound but to make room for breath. For I have been an occupied city, streets patrolled by fear, every chorus a siren, every bridge lifted in worship a trigger.
