Wednesday 18 July 2018

In Dreams Reprising

There is more going on, technically, in this lyric than at first meets the eye. In all stanzas lines 1 and 3 have feminine endings, all others are masculine; lines 2 and 4 are trochaic, all others are iambic. In the first and last stanzas line 4 has four stresses, in the three intervening stanzas it has five. The first and last stanzas use the same rhyme sounds; all five stanzas use the same rhyme sounds in the last two lines. The first line of all stanzas ends with an 'r' word, the third line ends with an 's' word.

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   In dreams reprising
Old and aching loves long lost,
   In sighs surprising
Faces fresh as morning’s frost;
Yet many years have blanched my skin
Since last I whispered chin to chin.

   There’s she reproving
Skirmishing to seize her waist
   And, huffed, surcharging
Later ploys to gain an arm emplaced;
Bright-haired and steely like a pin
She led my hand to cup her chin.

   And she reprieving
Fancy feints to win a kiss,
   Amused, surmounting
All such fumbles with a tender hiss;
Green-eyed above a lover’s grin
She flounced my hair and chafed my chin.
 
   And both repressing
Tears at love’s inconstancy
   And, hurts supplanting,
Willing to forgive my truancy;
But I enthralled with hearts to win
Upended sense and turned my chin.

   In dreams reprising
Loves so true and now long lost,
   In sighs surprising
Faces thinned as some poor ghost;
Grown old with neither kith nor kin
My heart erupts and quakes my chin.

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© September 2014

 

Thursday 12 July 2018

A Shop Doorway

The story of George the drinker was told to me by an acquaintance. It struck me immediately and linked up with some other themes I wanted to discuss to produce this poem. The stanza used is rhyme royal.

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Bathed in moonlight, beyond the midnight hour,
The Weald outside the window wet with dew,
Sage Tennyson died at peace, his bed a bower
Of loved ones’ tears, the truths that Shakespeare knew
In a volume in his hand. Soon, folk would queue
At Poets’ Corner to praise his symbolled life:
Art, success, a good death, a grateful wife.                                           

In a shop door stinking with booze and faeces                          
George the drinker expires in his own filth;                                    
That day, his face a mess of sweating creases,                          
He sought quietus from a priest, a tilth
Of blessing to flee him to his death; his health
Reneged, alone, in pain, with anguished eyes,                           
He stiffened in a foetus-like demise.                                                      

Death teaches truths which shuffle-footed man
Begs not to hear. The Poet’s great-aged passing
In painless sleep, innocuous as a fan
Of breath, has brazened thoughtless folk now lazing
In glib autonomy, sans suffering,
To hold that health and years trump mourning bells
And death’s a dim if puzzling something else.

But man’s a creature of unstable clay
Who, laughing, crying, is a spawn of God;
His glands and ducts are destined to decay
And that’s a fearful tale of pain and blood;
Sarcoma’d man, exhaling on the rood,                                      
Must quarry in his own heart’s stony ground
To find the balm of Being in his wound.

And so, longevity and glam fulfilment
Are rags aflap in the bawling winds of time
And make for men, as creatures all, concealment                            
From flesh’s task – to suffer in a slime                                      
Of agony; St Paul says, Adam’s crime                                      
Effaced, and gravid made in woe, creation
Groans in child-pang like a woman in dilation.

From plankton to the snarling lion pack                                    
Things feed on things, razoring flesh from bone                         
And cold to screams. Big-brained, atop that stack                                
Of pain, amassing man, uneasy grown,
Surveys the glebe self-knowledge makes his own –                              
A universe in suffering aware                                                                
Of something hidden and its forceful stare.

In flesh-deep wounds your blood which wells is Christ’s:
Whose Body, twisted, leaking, spittle-splayed,
Was racked upon a Cross; nailed at the wrists
He hung like us, but our first fruits displayed
For, Rising, showed that suffering, if prayed,
A shop door swings unhung with any wreath,
And proves the way to truth and life, in death.

So George the drinker, sundered in his waste,
Found truths unguessed at by the coddled sage;
That being’s crown is pain, and life disgraced
A prize more fruitful than a rich man’s wage;                             
For disabused of creatures’ bleak-eyed rage                                        
Through death he grasped a Hand which, bruised and flayed,
The price of his eternal joy had paid.
 
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© September 2014