Last Call

As a child and a teenager I used to attend a mission-hall, Which had an outreach to the homeless of Edinburgh; And every three weeks until I was about seven, They would give the last call so that god could your soul deliver. They said at the end of every sermon, Every three weeks in the evening, “This is the last call!” and they meant ever, ‘Cos Jesus could return any time for the believing. I felt so intimated by it, this unkind presence of mind, That I could not properly sit on my seat, But I knew that they were insane with melancholy, And that it was the real dynamics of life that they could not heat. I refused to chat with them after services and at the youth club, About what I believed and about the in and outs of my thoughts, But poignantly sat down with the Youth Fellowship leader once, And talked to him about what in me life had very clearly wrought. When I said outrightly that I did not believe in the Second Coming, And that life was for keeps, give or take a few possibilities, It was as if his world crashed down disarrayed in shambles, As he was shattered by my philosophical sway and confident amble. He realised fully that I was damning their last call, The pressure of it and how it riled, writhed and tormented; That it was for no good reason, for no universal moral principle, For no disciplinary cause and for no complimentary angle. So he arrogantly walked away from me, rudely with passivity, Not aware of his own need of polity, sense and direction, But it was a triumph for that mission-hall boy worker, To react to an objector so firmly and not himself recapture. They were generally unresponsive and indifferent, To intelligent objectors who had a righteous way, Because this left them with their day-to-day lunacy, With reality dressed for them to face another day. That mission has changed today into a Christian centre, Bright and refurbished and selling lunches in a cafe, And I am proud of its journey, how far it came, Because the transition was by no means lame.