The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2025. For April, we are delighted to publish three new works by P. C. Evans. The last of these, ‘The Resurrection of the Lord‘, is published today. The accompanying photographs are by the photographer and artist, David Street.

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The Resurrection of the Lord

 

Ahimè, che piaghe vidi ne’ lor membri 

 

Musculus Rectus, green-tinged, stalks

Corpse-like through the catacombs

Of Burleigh Mansions. If, concierge,

One were to enquire after the captain, concerning

A burial at sea, tell them

He neither broke the new wood, nor

Carved it, nor built the coffin

For the internment of Scansion.

 

From the parish of Corpus Christi then I came,

Blinking into the light,

To pass through the crowds

At Colonial House,

Slick as a field-mouse

Not shaking the grass.

To sign my name? Thank you, no,

Though the penitents linger on death row.

And the generalissimo like an Exocet

Is homing in on Heathrow.

Indifferent to the inferno?

Ma però che già mai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s’i’ odo il vero.

 

Should I delete Jew,

And replace it with what you

Would have me do,

If now was then,

Tell me how,

Meine Englische Frau.

 

Such strange fits of passion have I known,

And I will dare to tell, but in the lover’s ear alone.

Or, was it the dispassion of the play-acting patrician,

Aping Cupidon on the jewelled throne.

 

And ought I to confess also

To the wounds I never saw

Upon their limbs, except in my imaginings,

As we held the branding irons against their skin,

Mocking and chastising till they died,

Where the air was rarefied,

And the flames of incandescent terror came.

And should it pain me now to remember such things?

 

For in the final reckoning

When the tongues are on fire, remember

That all who would suspire expire

To either be consumed in the purgatorial fire,

Or on a petrol-soaked pyre.

 

Pray for a sinner now

And in the hour of his departure.

 

 

P.C. Evans is a Welsh poet, writer and translator of poetry, novels and drama, resident in Amsterdam. His latest publications are Grand Larcenies (Carcanet) and The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street (Scribe).