A PRAYER TO THE ANGEL

You came by night in three parts: a symbolic trinity of past, present and future. Your foundation was sunk into mineshafts where there were echoes of unfettered redundant trolleys rolling up and down aimlessly: skeletons of men and horses killed in pursuance of profit not their own, swallowed by the insatiably greedy savage pig-iron tiger. Life was ugly, brutal, mechanical; but structured and rhythmical. Then, there and all around the tiger burned brightly: the Swan once incandesced where you spread your emancipatory wings. Elsewhere, too, the tide was turning: the rapacious cokeworks at Derwenthaugh, for example, were buried by a once-more natural beauty of Turner's time. A bird's-eye view once appeared to be criss-crossed with tarry bootstraps where tyremarks were and industrial railways ran. They are replaced with a radiant green filigree of cycleways and finery. The blaring factory chimneys that once trumpeted smoke have sprung into daffodils and the factories themselves into music halls; the Flour Mill is flowering and the artisan becomes artist. Turner replaces turner. Thus from the hellish deprivation of the past, from its dormant despair, germinates the hope of the present to be cultivated and arise into fruition of the future. Its flower is near and its noontide short. Barbaric desolation ruled at the time of the last millennium. It may reassert itself in the next, when we are nothing but dust and you are but rust. Let us seize this moment. We have seen even in our lifetimes the milk of human kindness curdle into a cynical, cheesy grin of greed. Let us pray, Angel, therefore, that your siting and our citing this prayer, kindles forth and restores the common promise and purpose of prosperity through hope and art; and that your iconic figure was mastered and limned in the all-seeing heaven and not forged and limbed by malefactory hands in some blind and dissolute hell. Amen.