Arvo Pärt in Concert, Durham Cathedral

November 1998

Sea-otters will be calving soon about the Farnes.

Perhaps you’ll go there, in your coat, tonight.

Perhaps you’ll go to Coldingham

or Lindisfarne, or, landlocked, wait, as if

you too were

sandstone: wounded, worn by wind, rain, light.

O Lord, enlighten my heart which evil desires have darkened

where the imperturbable pillars stand.

For you have fidgeted through sermons.

Hard to sit still with all your insufficiency about you, isn't it?

But you will listen through your permeable skin as if

this music were

slow wounding, swearing in, osmosis.

Ebba, abbess of Coldingham, will find her nuns forsaken, fidgeting,

but you, as Cuthbert, suffering for all, will make straight

for the sea, to stand all night

waist-deep in it,

in praise and prayer,

in fret, is it, or under the stars’ bare

scattering of thorns –

O Lord, give me tears and remembrance of death, and contrition –

until dawn. When you will kneel down on the sand.

Sea-otters will come to warm you then.

But you must be as sandstone.

Make of this music an Inner Farne where you may stand alone.

For it is Farne, from Celtic ferann, meaning land,

where monks will dig a well for you of wild fresh water,

where you’ll find not wheat but barley growing on bare ground,

where you will build a wall so high around

your oratory, you’ll know the sky, it only

a while

as instrumental, wearing-in of wind and water. Listen

then, you’ll find your own skin, salt, intact

as Cuthbert after centuries of wandering, still

permeable –

O Lord, forsake me not –

and one, as Arvo Pärt in his coat, will stand before

the orchestra, the choir, as if he too had only now

walked out of water

new, renewable, knowing the comfort of sea-otters.

GILLIAN ALLNUTT