The Wind Cries Mary...

After all the jacks are in their boxes and the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footprints dressed in red. And the wind whispers, Mary

A broom is drearily sweeping up the broken pieces of yesterday's life
Somewhere a Queen is weeping. Somewhere a King has no wife
And the wind it cries Mary

The traffic lights they turn blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sails downstream cause the life that lived is, is dead
And the wind screams Mary

Will the wind ever remember the names it has blown in the past?
And with this crutch, its old age and its wisdom
It whispers no, this will be the last
And the wind cries Mary...



You will know that Liverpool has a famously modern Catholic Cathedral, partially based on the original Lutyens' design... I hadn't known that there were four attempts to get a Cathedral built in the city - the Irish potato famine 1847 meant that the numbers of Irish Catholics in Liverpool had swelled the ranks of the faithful in the city... All designs and plans were scuppered owing to excessive and spiralling costs, competing priorities, unrealistic designs and possibly issues with the site...

"Liverpool's Fourth Cathedral: Gibberd's Reality

Even more drastic measures, thought Doctor Heenan, were necessary if the Catholics of Liverpool were to achieve the realisation of Archbishop Downey's dream slogan 'A Cathedral in our time'. The problem was to be thrown open to competition.

Architects throughout the world were invited in 1960 to design a Cathedral for Liverpool which would relate to the existing Crypt, be capable of construction within five years, cost at the current prices no more than one million pounds for its shell, and most important of all, express the new spirit of the liturgy then being radically reformulated by the Second Vatican Council.

Of 300 entries from all over the world, Sir Frederick Gibberd's (1908-1984) design was chosen, and building began in October 1962. Less than five years later, on the Feast of Pentecost, 14 May 1967, the completed Cathedral was consecrated. The Papal Legate at the consecration, most appropriately, was His Eminence John Carmel Cardinal Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster, who had been succeeded as Archbishop of Liverpool three years earlier by George Andrew Beck. The long waiting was suddenly over". Source