As you probably already know, the Venerable Bede wrote, in the oldest ever history of England, an anecdote about when Pope Gregory the Great saw English people for sale in the slave market of Rome.  He enquired, “Who are they?!?”

“Angles,” he was told.

Gregory replied, “Not Angles, but Angels.”

The KJV says that humans were “made a little lower than the angels.”  Heb. 2:7

Here is what I wrote today, because of an ugly, close-cropped redhead sitting across the desk from me in the British Library:

                    Angles, not Angels

    What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite

         in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable,

                              in action how like an angel

Not all of us are handsome, destined to

Be marble statues Phidias would make.

The bulk of us have several things askew.

If we were movies, there’d be a retake,

Or, worse, the shooting would be shelved, binned, jacked.

A lot of us are far from what a pope

Would more than merely canonize.  In fact,

On seeing us he’d probably just slope

Off muttering, ‘You’d better quickly strangle

‘Em.  Made below angels?  What a laugh!’

Examine near enough any Angle

And you’ll have to say, ‘God made a gaff ‘–

And that’s not counting men with skinned red hair

And freckle-ruined skin creams can’t repair.

September 8, 2010