Silver Birches

Today I came on a stand of birches

dazzling in late evening sunlight.

A tableau of, maybe, a dozen nudes;

splendid, shameless.

Torsos of Elginesque splendour,

arms twining upward in Grecian gracefulness;

statuesque beauties

nonchalant in Olympian lasciviousness.

The Old Man's Song

The old man loves to sing, but has a cracked voice;

when he sings he cracks the song;

a song not written for old men.

And the composer may, indeed, take umbrage, as singer,

word after word, loses footing on crumbling notes.

But the old man, singing his song,

takes his listeners along a less frequented path; he’s singing

defunct dreams, wispy happinesses, worries and triumphs.

Fissures open between the words, and there, sure enough,

is the other song: the song of life passing.

The Old Men in the Day-Room

A picture of institutionalized men from about 1970. A nineteenth century room, dark but for a smallish window that allowed afternoon sunlight; bare, bleak and empty for the most part. Dickensian. 

The Old Men in the Day-Room

A rectangular pool of sunlight mid-room;

shadow-clad men on wooden benches around the walls,

features lost in the dark recesses of their faces,

bodies rolled, slumped in sack-black coats;

fingers splayed skeletal on the crooks of walking sticks,

breathing like tide gurgling at the backs of sea-caves

eyes peering from below the surfaces of shallow pools.

Those were the men of the workhouse

in the mid-afternoon gloaming of their day-room,

in the late evening of their lives.

Silence between them, between them and us;

sitting there, boulders in the passing world,

their ears no longer tuned to the pitch of life.

Slaughter House

White filled socket, an eye twisted, with its contorted,

straining body, away from that room. At the end of a rope

taut to the straightness of cane, haunches working, legs

thrashing, sliding in shit; and men flat out dragging,

pushing the heifer towards the slaughter-house doorway.

Roaring beast, terrified as humans are; same recognition,

same fight, same blood gut muscle response, same horror;

and men, angular to their brutal task, dragging, pushing,

hauling to death chambers. At the end of a rope taut to the

straightness of cane, a tongue extending grossly from a mouth.