Days, Pages, Happiness

 

What you’ve never grasped

is your days are flying loose,

pages in the wind,

and you busy about filling them,

never catching them.

Happiness is  sunlight

on the pages;

it flies with the days.

.

History Lesson

 

All of that twentieth century history

went in, piled up;

from childhood, it stacked:

the cold war, Bay of Pigs, coup d’etats,

dictators, famines, invasions,

Vietnam, Congo, Falklands, Belfast, Kosovo;

treaties, broken treaties, military exercises,

nuclear arsenals, on and on

and we got wise

and understood that nations are hungry

and savage;

there were always answers and we knew them

from a young age.

And the great page turned, twentieth to twenty first:

still they came: Darfur, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan,

invasions, piracy, terrorist attacks, revolutions

until we know nothing,

and therefore

on it goes.

Bloodbath

Trump's recent 'bloodbath' comment continues his pattern of being incendiary. This (not so delicately embedded in his speech-making) stoking of violence, the self-cultivated  image of his own greatness, his demanding of loyalty to himself, the outrageous claims of his abilities to rid the world of ongoing problems, his narcissism are all so reminiscent of other dictators. Add that to his fondness of autocrats:

my question is how, with all the knowledge of history available to us, do we allow presidents, the people with the greatest potential to do damage, to act outside the checks and balances everyone else is subject to? 

Bloodbath

Loyalty to a man or a country, even an organization

may lead to a bloodbath;

loyalty to humanity would not.

Humanity appeals;

the others order;

which, would you say, has its roots in freedom?

Jam

 

Plump juicy blackberries:

that’s where the Summer went.

Rosy-cheeked apples, damsons:

-- energy neither created nor destroyed --

Summer’s sun packaged for Winter’s want.

September, we stretched across the hedges,

beat the birds to the berries,

and filled our cans. All went into the pot;

the kitchen filled with clouds of steam;

the windows, opaque,

cut us off from the world.

Fresh bread thickly sliced and buttered,

slathered in blackberry jam

still warm and flowing; we ate greedily

while the jars, in ranks,

stood prepared to face the darker months.

Your Young Beauty

 

Young beauty settled on your face,

extended its wings a moment,

then flew.

The skin over your bones slackened,

took the shape of your humours;

there was no concealing.

Finally, life, like traffic

over the snow-white landscape of beauty,

is your billboard to the world.

Behind the Glass

This poem has been with me for years in one shape or another. I've posted more than one effort in the  past, but was never convinced. All versions go on display, but, like a photographer's work, there'll always be one photograph that has the edge; I think this has the atmosphere I've been searching for. There's a good chance I won't look back at this for a while in case I meet disappointment. Come another book though, I'll have to weigh it up.

Behind the Glass

Every day, sitting at her window,

looking out onto the street of her life,

empty now.

Her face, just her face, hanging

behind the glass;

a room untroubled by sunlight;

the darkness of a Rembrandt portrait

and wearing old age like a mask.

She's waiting for the street’s stories

but the street has nothing to say;

she continues, daily

 staring into the space where her life was.

 

This needle,

my mind balancing on it;

its mercury glint

a painful ecstasy.

She fires words

 

She fires words

spiky as hail;

I shoot them down;

they’re unwelcome in my heaven.

But the same words go off

over and over;

some see you out,

shovel in the clay.

Truth is words are clouds;

I don’t shoot them;

I shoot at them.

Now, Then and Forever

 

When their bodies are cold and stony,

we lay them among the boulders on the hillside,

a resting place within sight of their homes,

fields and children; in the company of their parents, ancestors.

We leave clothing, corn, arrows, bone knives by their sides

and align them with the returning sun.

Our prayers flutter on strings, clicking for the attention

of the gods who gave birth to the mountains,

rivers and stars; chattering till we, ourselves, arrive.

They expect us, and all the generations coming;

we are currents, the stones oversee our passing,

September Swallows

 

Knots on the wires untying themselves,.

rise into the sky

like crochets escaping staves.

September swallows, restless,

must shed nesting order

as commas might abandon sentences.

Their Autumn selves must unfurl,

wheel, sweep and swoop; for tomorrow

they will trace lines of longitude.

His last tune

 I've tried to get this right before, my father on his hospital bed after suffering a stroke. A moment that has stayed with me, poignant and beautiful. My wife arrived to see  him and that's where the poem comes in.

When he was beyond talking,

close to dying, you visited.

For want of words he could not form

he hummed a  tune,

unrecognizable, tuneless; 

and never was a tune more beautiful.

Cirrus

 

Cirrus,

dolphins of high heavens,

sing light

harvested

from deepest sky-ridges.

ikeanisation of office spac

 folded in a roll

above shoulders

the cape

with fabric loops

to hang light-weight

plastic stool

down human back

over fold-up table

and drawer

of ultra-light material

rotational

for mealtimes

above the waistline-

mounted laptop

After Hiroshige

 

A peacock on a branch,

waterfall.

                      Along the Tokaido road

                      a wave,

                      landscape rearing above a lake;

                                                            

                                                              a display, magnificent,

                                                              like a peacock on a branch.

Autobiography

 

Here’s the wind that brought me;

here’s the day that sang;

here’s the grass that was my mother

and there the trees that taught me.

Here are the hills that were my dreams;

there’s the river that aged me

and this is its silt upon my face.

Here’s the bay that sought me out,

the mountaintop I must climb is beneath it;

that is where I’m headed.