Courtenay Griffiths KC, our former colleague, sadly passed earlier this month. All of us at Garden Court offer our deepest condolences to his family, and are honoured to share a poem by Sean Horstead as a tribute.
Courtenay, Lightly Upon The Wing
Jamaican sun rises over ocean
Silver mist upon an indigo plain,
Amber glow is invited to blush
As night’s gown falls to sea,
And the azure horizon emerges
Awakened
By first light’s kiss.
Four billion years of this,
Time’s routine
Marking each night by day’s inevitability
Defining a truth that predates us:
All life is contingent –
Infinitesimal pin pricks of being and chance –
Yet in such insignificance, we dare to judge.
But his life was more:
Courage enough to risk caring,
Fierce enough to stand up
To take on the fight and Defend
And to drive the fight for change.
The difference his difference made –
Impossibility destroyed, the possible unchained –
Will be felt for generations to come.
A witness beyond his own testimony
Courtenay exists
As a sequence of life as truthful as his love’s certainty:
His kindness, his curiosity, his generosity.
But in setting any cherished life aside,
We feel the end
As if all is all is all, is emptied into darkness and forever,
The mere ‘begot, begat, begone’ of it all
Leaves us bereft
In the shadow of an absence bequeathed,
And in all that that silence names:
The past, it seems, is all there is.
But time does not pass, it abides:
It remains, at once both behind and beyond –
And Courtenay, too, remains before us
In his sheer, unadulterated brilliance
The skill beyond his words,
In the connections beyond his reach
In the love bigger even than his heart.
It is in that remembered glance
In his very nature’s easings:
A pause, a turn, a jury held –
His quizzical gaze at the hog-tied police witness,
The incomparable timbre of a voice that sat full square
Upon each syllable, word and sentence:
Resolute, redoubtable clarity –
A magnificent, simple coherence to every spoken word,
At once a comfort and a joy to all –
Save the humectant witness,
Dreading the end of the question
And their continuing public unravelling.
It is in his utterly, blindingly contemptuous smile
At and through the errant Judge –
Or any supercilious Prosecutor –
(educated beyond ability at some minor Public School),
But all wrapped in the silken, plausible deniability
Of Courtenay’s unimpeachable courtesy,
And in that immaculate, insolent, impression of ‘respect’
For the ‘Majesty’ of the Court.
And, in contrast, his holding of any jury as close as family:
In his confidence, his integrity, his authenticity,
In the comedic, moveable feast of the accents upon which he could draw,
In his narrative, his truth,
And culminating, inevitably, in their ‘reasonable doubt’.
Beyond the confines of ‘charisma’
He shimmered and shone
Illuminating the cell, the court room, any lectern or screen
With something beyond light:
Like an Ali, like a King, it felt as if the camera,
Even your very own eyes,
Could not quite capture and comprehend
All that was before us –
As if this life-being was simply more,
Somehow and simply ‘beyond’.
Mindful, mind full – my mind and yours:
Our minds made up by memories of Courtenay Griffiths.
He took his memories with him
Leaving ours as ephemeral and yet as real
As the glittering tail of the comet’s trace,
And as true as a swallow’s contented dreams
As he sleeps, now,
But lightly upon the wing.
