Tuesday 20 February 2024

Season's Change

Here's a link to "In a Summer Garden," which, on reflection, has very little to do with the theme of "Season's Change," but what the hell... It was written in August 1980 and posted on 4 June 2012. (By the way, in the final stanza the rhythm requires that the Greek word Agápe be pronounced Agapé. Not having any Greek I am confused because the Oxford English Dictionary - before the wokeist luvvies got hold of it - gives the latter pronunciation.)

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      The seasons change,
      The body aches,
And there’s no joy in ale and cakes;
      The great estrange
      From warmth to cold
Shivers the flesh like shoes un-soled:
   Hallows’ Eve for some
   Comes with deaths and wakes.

      Plans neatly plumb,
      Ambitions great,
For one who lived beyond the gate
      Collapsed to crumb;
      And fates and loves
Now ripped and stained like floor-dropped gloves
   Fester in remorse,
   Tapping sorrow’s drum.

      Thoughts become coarse
      And limbs are crick,
Eyes wander, guilty, with a tic;
      Like frost on gorse
      Sins' razors cut,
Selves parlay but can only “but”:
   Wary, bodies limp –
   Judged, no longer trick.

      And grits are skimp,
      The urbs decays,
Its self-myth stripped to un-gemmed clays,
      Grey-veined and crimp;
      Exhaustion’s moan
Finals what now will be ungrown:
   City walls unkept
   Shadow thief and pimp.

      Now Time has crept
      To winter’s brim:
Will riddling Birth or roisters’ whim –
      A foot which stepped
      Through crusted snow –
Scuffle a path that men might know
   Warmth, spring’s flaring hum;
   Truth, that’s nature’s limn?

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© October 2021

"Autonomy"

From famine to surfeit. Here's a much fuller treatment on this theme, called "Urbi et Orbi," written in December 1979 and posted on 11 December 2011.

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   Christ Cross-ly cauterized the world then Rose:
His challenge opened Heaven’s gates: we so-and-sos,
   Now choiced, should dash to Him upon our toes;
Instead we game the odds then freeze in hell-gate’s snows.

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© August 2021

Three Ages

In a very early poem, "Four Answers Above," written sometime in 1973-76, I broadly covered (oh dear, I've split an infinitive) the same theme albeit from a much gloomier point of view. And I was only in my twenties! I posted it on 23 December 2013; it is linked here.

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Even though the young have all the luck,
      Their wits, their strength,
Sheer stamina that goes to any length
   To gain an edge, to earn a buck,
      They still end up stuck.

Come midlife and there’s little left to suck
      And see: there’s bills,
Alimony and redundant skills:
   You may try a final dodge or duck,
      But you still end up stuck.

Of age I’m speechless: you survive the ruck
      And climb age’s heights
But find mere sickness, frailty and spites:
   Death will giggle, its hand will pluck –
      And you’ll know you are stuck.

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© August 2021

Tuesday 23 January 2024

Time Passes

I find I covered the same subject in a lyric, "Impromptu," written in February 1980 when I wasn't even old. I posted it on 26 December 2012 and it is linked here. Twelve lyrics on the months of the year, and therefore called "Months: Lyrics," written in 2014/5, were posted on 11 March 2016 and are linked here.

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      An ancient wall,
   And one brick shoddy-red
   (Things decay and fall)
Crumbling palely in the rain’s
   Dissolving caterwaul:
In short years gone it’s dust and dross
At the wall’s foot, crawled on by moss.
   Time passes, so pass I.

   The leggy Shepherd’s Purse
   Gangling by the wall
   (Things decay and fall)
Grows dry, yellows to mulching sticks,
Sortileged by an autumn squall:
Those abandoned bones will lie in frost
By the needy chaffinch grubbed and tossed.
   Time passes, so pass I.

      A neighbour’s dog
      Gone gruff and old
   (Things decay and fall)
Lifts its leg against the wall,
Wheedling a few drops’ rancid scrawl,
Then limps off with a weary bark
Having made its final short-lived mark.
   Time passes, so pass I.

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© August 2021

Hark! The Lark!

This should be read with a certain speed, thus copying the singing manner of the lark. I have been reading the Elizabethans recently and they often contrast the lark with the cuckoo. Hence, opportunistically, here's a link to a poem on a totally different theme and written as long ago as 1980. It's called "The Cuckoo,"  was posted on 1 January 2013 and is linked here 

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A hidden dot in heaven’s misted blue –
That vault that’s depthless,
Arching from one far vista to horizon’s other –
And yet insisting on its presence,
Its song a tress
Of radiation that’s unquenchable
As upland streams, as swittering
From rock to rock in barbling freefall,
Scooting in lightfoot pleasaunce
Vertexly down scree and sprawl,
They seek a hearer open-mouthed impressed
By acrobatics’ twirling similes of song,
The skylark broadcast-sows its one and all:
"Avaunt you pigeon-chested knock-kneed males,
Come hither, yes hither, you ladies all,
Here’s a squire who fills his thong,
Eager to tup all summer long,
That, brood on brood,
My offspring like a Saxon horde
May claim the scrub and crop-rich fields
Of these chalk-boned and lazy-rolling wolds!"
An hour or more he hangs
And sings, the syrup-heat of summer, hued
And dense, lolling like ocean swells;
His wings in dashing flitter
Pump up his shout;
Like bells it pells, mells, wells, quells,
Skittles like shells, invokes like spells,
That none might guess
That ground-returned
He’s but a ball of drying mud,
Leaf-shred flecked and mongrel,
Belly-plump like a swelling downy bud,
His only brag his bristling crest,
Rising, sinking, rising, sinking,
As billiard-eyed he darts here-there,
Glancing, glaring, glancing:
How like the silly human, that crack-brained chest-thump chump,
Lard-bellied, trigger-fused concerned with “face”!
Take air, man, launch,
With weightless grace
Ascend the sun’s rich otherness,
Forgetting ground-stuck truths;
Think only of the lark as pure
Affectless being merged in thrilling blue,
A presence and a fons
Which sheerly gives beyond all mind or weal;
And as that lark which neither knows nor cares
But, winging, sings,
So, too, do you.

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© July/August 2021

Tuesday 19 December 2023

Bag O'Guts

This obviously worries at the same theme as my poem "Bowel on Legs," posted recently on 26 November 2023. The Biblical allusions in the final stanza are to Ezekiel 37: 1-14 and 1 Thess. 4:15-16.

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   All beauty, fineness, gloss of mind,
   Great thoughts, great passions, every kind,
   Boil down to reams of gastric lights,
   A’slivered, greasy, greys and whites,
   The womb of life, no ifs, no buts,
   A loathsome mobile bag o’ guts.

   My true love with a look so sweet
Cried, “Yes and yes, and let our bodies meet,”
   But her guts fell out and swung to her knees,
   Hanging like vines beneath the trees.

   The savant with his glass-clear eyes
Wrote wisdom’s books, compendious as the skies,
   But his guts fell out in sheeny ropes
   Which strangled all his careful tropes.

   The mother and her new-born child
An each-loved Eden crooned, so pure, so mild,
   But their guts fell out and swamped the cot
   With oily snakes which drowned the tot.

   Heads of state a’scheming late
Disposed of rivals, never governing straight,
   But their guts fell out all looped in grins,
   Purple-rotting like eels in gins.

   O Son of man, can these guts live,
   Their stinking heapings in a sieve,
   What mid-air fiat might save this flesh
   That’s soul and mind and tripes in mesh,
   How can wet guts, their ducts and folds,
   Be divinized to gems and golds?

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© July 2021

Pride: Skeltonics

I have not closely read John Skelton but should because there is much more to him than the disorganized rhymester we tend to think him. Obviously the poem below plays with that caricature. It is an exercise on one rhyme. I did the same thing with "At Seventy," posted on 15 August 2022 and linked here and "Admonished," posted on 26 September 2019 and linked here. I think I have now worked out that particular vein!

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That which damns a man is pride;
All sins lead from and to its side:
The one who spryed,
The one who shied,
And he who spied,
And who was snide;
With self’s glamour plied,
All scale and context fied,
Surely all such to date have fried,
Joining Satan in his fiery bide.
They screech, they screech, “I tried
“All rules and guidings to abide;
“But, oh, I lusted after another’s bride,
“And easily I lied,
“With a practised sidestepped slide
“I pocketed what I descried,
“And when wants and wills collide
“Is it too much to ensure my foeman died?”
Ho! now they know that Justice, wide,
May glide,
May stride,
And then condignly chide.
Elide
Who will the facts of pride,
By it good will is dried,
Is mummified,
And each bon that’s cried
Is blackened, dyed,
Suborned to hide
Or on its heels has hied,
An absconded guide.
A man’s left pied,
Black-white, his sins unpryed,
And the Tempter’s streetcar required to ride;
And if he sighed
For Truth that’s skied,
But did so in pride,
It’s trumps he’ll drown in God’s wrath’s tide.

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© July 2021