Paul Alkazraji's Blog - Posts Tagged "poem"

Psalm 40-09-19

Psalm 40-09-19

Praise The Company, my soul!
O Company, how great you are!
You are clothed in glass and steel;
you spread out your buildings
across the cities
and built your home
in the penthouse above.
You use the telex machine
as your chariot
and flashes of data as your servants.
You ride on the wings
of your digital communications networks.
You set your office block
firmly on its foundations.
You spoke and your employees responded;
at the shout of your command
there were cashpoint dispensers
at the four corners of the nation.
You make water flow in the toilets
and there the wild office juniors
quench their thirst.
Praise The Company, my soul!
O Company, how great you are!

O Company, I am in great pain,
my heart is troubled
and my eyes have lost their brightness.
Because I have been foolish
I am drowning in the flood of my debts;
they are a burden too heavy to bear.
All night long my creditors plot against me;
they are like lions waiting for me
wanting to tear me to pieces.
O Company, don’t let them gloat over my distress.
You have examined my financial history
and you know everything I do;
from far away you understand all my thoughts.
Where could I go to escape your influence?
If I flew away beyond the NatWest,
you would find me.
If I lay down in the world of the dead,
you would have a branch office there.

Have mercy upon me, O Company
according to your unfailing love.
In your compassion
cancel all of my debts,
clear out all of my records,
wash away the stain of my defaults.
Look at my suffering
and restore my wealth
and I will meditate
on my future fiscal obligations.
Hear my prayer, O Company!
Forgive me all that has passed
so that I may rejoice and sing
in the shadow of your protection;
so that I may proclaim
to the people of all nations
that you reign with justice and mercy
and that you have not abandoned me.
Praise The Company, my soul!
O Company, how great you are!

A psalm I wrote in response to some of the pseudo-divine pretentions of UK banks and building societies in their TV advertisement campaigns of the time.

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Published on February 24, 2022 09:17 • Tags: poem, psalm, satire

‘Hallelujah’ – A song brought back from obscurity

‘I heard there was a secret chord, that David played and it pleased the Lord,’ begins Leonard Cohen’s much-loved song ‘Hallelujah’, the seam around which this new documentary ‘Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song’ holds together. So like that chord, one can wonder if the popular ‘hymn’ pleased the true Lord of song too.

This September, I settled into the velvet ambiance of a little theatre in England with a cup full of pick-n-mix to enjoy both the sugary and matinee treats. As well as the biographical elements, the story of the song was fascinating indeed. The album on which it was first recorded, ‘Various Positions’ in 1984, was, incredibly, refused release in the USA. Columbia records gave the work and its producer John Lissauer such a damning vote of zero confidence that they both seemed consigned to obscurity.

Yet the song was later picked up and sung by Bob Dylan, John Cale and Rufus Wainwright. It was given a jet-boosting by Jeff Buckley and then the Shrek film version (without the ‘naughty bits’ as co-director Vicky Jenson explains) before becoming the supersonic standard of TV talent show spectaculars and taking on a life of its own. A trajectory with ‘a fourth, a fifth, a minor fall, and a major lift’ indeed.

With its religious and sexual imagery drawn from the Bible’s accounts of King David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah, it mixes the sacred and the profane in a hymn of sorts, though not of ‘somebody who's seen the light’. Cohen, a spiritual seeker, did not seem to find David’s Lord for himself.

It was when Mr Cohen went to the bank’s ATM, and realised his business manager had stolen all his earnings, that he was compelled to go back out on the road once more in 2008, by now in his early-seventies, with a band of superb musicians. On the opening night, we see his undoubted charm as he sings in tones that sink down deep as a cavern: ‘I was born like this/ I had no choice/ I was born with the gift of a golden voice.’ Sell out tours, where the bookings kept coming, lasted for five years. They were the swansong of his life.

The story that I liked, though, was of how a quality piece of writing (150 to 180 song verses that still remained a work in progress) could so easily have been lost in the archives of time as a record label reject. Yet it found unanticipated champions that brought it an incredible level of public attention decades later. It points up just how many more of the fine works of others may have fallen the same anonymous way, but also to the tantalising possibility of just what can, and might yet, happen to a writer’s buried gems. Hallelujah!