Undulating radiance
away, out to the horizon;
five silhouettes
dancing in it:
a perfection, I believe;
I do believe that.
Beyond them, in that light,
things I wish I said,
long ago
before perfections dimmed;
and still,
still my love.............
This poem has been with me for years. It seems like its content to have an enduring relationship with passing time. The image goes back to the eighties; have I finished with it? Only time can tell.
The Remaining.
See the watch-maker’s face bulge
disappear and bulge in clock glass;
his eyepiece transporting him back
to the innards of Victorian time;
their cogs acting his age; he cupping them,
tiny bones; nudging them onward
to tick his seconds away, and all the time
skeletons, back to his fathers’ reign,
lining the shelves like sunken galleons,
insensible the endless drift of the years.
By sheer coincidence I'm posting this on Poetry Day Ireland. I came across the quotation and felt I had something to say on the matter. The poem does, I think, speak the truth for some, but I would not disagree that poetry has, for many, a healing effect, and I think this has probably been particularly the case during the pandemic.
"poetry led me by the hand out of madness"
Ann Sexton
So often, poetry starts a journey but does not arrive;
drops your hand somewhere out on the plain.
Sometimes, it leads through a series of holograms, pictures
of a journey, then scampers off into a faraway dot.
Or insinuates that you are mad and it is the map
that will return you to yourself.
And sometimes it is the madness; so for your bearings,
keep note of the landscape passing.
From nails I hang,
abandoning my corpse like sloughed off skin.
From these four open corners my sprit flies
unfettered by earths’ directions.
Love defying hatred;
I give you the ladder of my bones.
Call me king,
only when I’ve given all for you.
Religion aside, the cross
as a symbol of freedom:
its four corners open
so it cannot contain;
its crossbeam embracing the sky,
poised for flight;
its shape more defined
when light floods about it.
.
Walking through the house: a trespass.
Your order, comforts, colours;
your breath, but not your breathing.
Walking inside your head
with no permission;
blundering into that unexpected museum-like staticity.
Walking in your space;
the ghost of you constantly passing
but the sunlight falling shadowless onto the floor.
(rewrite of a poem posted a few years back)
My mid-morning kitchen;
the clouds have opened;
a billion motes are dawdling
in a slant sunlight.
Afternoon, on a park bench;
a pool of sunlight before me;
inside, a cosmos of flies
demonstrate Brownian motion.
It's midnight; I stop to watch
moths in a lamp-light,
they are meteorites streaking
from invisibility to invisibility.
here's some advice from Ogden Nash:
Always Marry An April Girl
Praise the spells and bless the charms,
no universe.
Male body in a coffin
crucified yesterday.
What is life, Lord;
what can we not see?
Thrown there, a pair of boots,
well scuffed, parched;
a lolling tongue
thirsting for dubbin.
Laces trailing away
like wire after an escape;
the boots waiting,
endlessly patient.
Leather whose memories
are those of old hands,
who remember the stories
in their sleep.
.
Danced a hornpipe on the stream
to its continuous applause.
60% water, the moon full,
I was, indeed, at the top of my form,
clicking the stones
and stomping up spray,
quavers and crotchets draining
from my heels;
and the rooks on the tops of the trees
were roaring me on, breaking into jigs
themselves, they were,
and the sky full of jingly silver
and shooting concertina notes.
The old men walk a circle from the home;
their old suits holding their bones together.
They stop at the bridge to inquire how life goes;
the river speaks differently to each, then slithers along.
Once, an old man lay down in middle of the road
just over the bridge and was killed almost instantly.
Old people see visions in rivers, they understand, walk on,
and maybe next day come back again to learn some more.
No one knows what he saw in the river, but no one doubts
that it was the river that directed him to his bed.
Into the earth they go, those lives barely more than dreams.
Nurtured, schooled, and delivered before the full flowering
of youth to the guns and bombs of wars spurred on by the
vainglorious who, beating the drums in the far distance, turn
on the tap of patriotic souls. And how they let it drip; oh, if it
had been a tap of water, it would’ve been mended long ago;
the pity is we don’t hear soldiers dying.
Portuguese singer/songwriter José 'Zeca' Alfonso at his best: Grandola vila morena, with its haunting accompaniment of marching feet is, even by the high standards of Portuguese music, extraordinarily stirring. Sometimes a song gives me the feeling that I must write, rare enough really, but when that sense lingers it is down to the strength of feeling the singer and song arouses, and this is definitely a case in point.
Grândola, brown town,
Land of fraternity;
It's the people who command
Inside you, oh city.
Inside you, oh city,
It's the people who command;
Land of fraternity,
Grândola, brown town.
On each corner there's a friend
In each face there's equality
Grândola, brown town,
Land of fraternity.
Land of fraternity
Grândola, brown town
In each face there's equality
It is the people who command
In the shadow of a holm oak
Which no longer knew its age
I swore as my companion,
your will, Grândola;
your will, Grândola,
I swore as my companion
In the shadow of a holm oak
Which no longer knew its age.
