A Psalm for Dylon Day

O woe is me for my clerical shirts are dark gray

and my black trousers are washed out, 

with white patches where they are most worn

if you know what I mean.

Where is the shiny blackness of old?

The monochromatic outward sign of inner clericalness?

How has the blackness faded from my life

to where I can be camouflaged against a bottlenosed dolphin.

Though my clothes were black as night

yet they are as gray as pigeons

Though they were like the cover of a big church Bible

yet they are as washed out as a vicar in the Elstow Team Ministry

who is required to have "boundless energy"

yet we are all but mortal.

And "boundless energy" is an offence unto the First Law of Thermodynamics

and aspiring to it more likely to invoke the Second.

And so I resort to Dylon

which turns all things to black

and restores the newness to old shirts

and is cheaper than buying new ones.

Though my shirts are gray as ashes

yet they shall be black as a 1990s company car

I shall be restored likeone that is newly ordained

or like an ordinand posing in the mirror.

 

I shall pray that the colour is fast

and the blackness does not run

So I do not end up in a pool of sweaty dye on the nice new floor

on a hot day in church

or staining the grass

at a rainy funeral.

I set my hope in Dylon that it shall cling to the cloth like Ruth to Naomi

or Barnabas to Mark.