text: At first, my hero:
  The Reverend J. D. Proberty,
  billowing cloud on a sit-up-and-beg,
  skirts of ankle length
  doing nothing to hamper
  the prowess he showed
  on a bicycle made for trousered men.
  To me that argued powers beyond
  the human or the practical.
  He had been sent by God, I had seen the sign -
  but not that, human , he was set to fall.
  My chest grew worse in London Smogs
  and Dev the Rev
  (our two names for him)
  He and I. To take the air -
  and in the proceess, to
  escape the London blitz as well.
  An open-ended stay.
  All expenses paid.
  Umbrage he took
  when my parents refused -
  but for my grandparents
  it marked the end of hm.
  He it was persuaded me
  to be an altar boy,
  but called me sinful, hearing I had drunk
  a mug of tea first thing, before
  the early morning "mass" -
  "Communion" to everybody else.
  Sunday School was in the church,
  but I was in his class,
  which always met
  somewhere in the vicarage:
  his library, the orchard,
  the great lawn or the garden.
  In season he would give out windfalls -
  though sometimes we'd have had
  some apples from the trees.
  Once in the church,
  peeping through my knuckles during prayers
  I saw high up in what we called the transept -
  our misnomer for a chapel
  tucked behind the choir - perched
  in the apex of the intervening arch,
  Blake's Ancient one of Days.
  It hovered for a while then disappeared.
  I told the Father what I'd seen.
  He exorcised the transept for our sins.
  William Blake's The Ancient of Days is from the Wikipedia Website