An Abject

In February 2015, for the first time in years, I succumbed to 'flu on the cusp of a busy programme of activity. As with many aging adolescents I took out my frustration in foul language aimed at everything and everyone - including the Lord. So much for my attempts at spiritual improvement. By March I had enough strength to sit at my desk and take myself to task with this poem. When I came to the last stanza I found that by chance the first rhymes were the same as in the first lines of the first stanza and so decided to repeat all the rhymes of the first stanza in the last.
   Note: the numbering of the Psalms in the Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible is different from that in Protestant Bibles.
   The preceding three little poems posted below - 'The Blackbirds,' 'In Sickness' and 'Wood Chipper' - record things seen and heard by me from my window whilst recuperating.

----------------

Psalm 83 (Douay-Rheims)

Burning in fever, how use your little strength,

Hoarding for healthtime, or easing fever’s length?
Ah no, in cursing, foul God-demeaning oaths,
Raging in self-woe, spasming in wraths,
Trouncing the Holy Name that I should lie struck –
Blasphemous filthy words, glutinous as muck –
My sick self vomiting contempt for the All,
Though, truth, a frightened kicking babe in its shawl.

    My God, my God, all life I’ve prayed to be

    Equal to the gross burden of being,
    Neither strutting upon sorrows recklessly
    Nor cringing from hard-mouthed facts, unseeing;
    But bedded by illness, a winter’s chore,
    In few hours my self-carapace unlimbs
    And I am jointed to a foul-word boor,
    A jelly of resentful heats and megrims.

    In honey time I said, I long to be

    An abject in the Saviour’s house and shun
    The sinners’ tabernacles. And so, He
    In shivering time provided me a portion
    Of His woes, which trustingly embraced avail
    Meaning and homing to the self-mind beast,
    But no, at the first sting of fever’s nail
    I sued for safety and renounced that feast.

Burning in fever, should He renounce my strength

And strip me to my stony self, length for length,
What use then catch-up ingratiating oaths
Obfuscating insults to escape just wraths?
Frankly exiled and from understanding struck,
A writhing mealworm in torment’s sweat and muck,
Frozen by fever, dead-shouldered by the All,
I faint in sickness as in a coffin shawl.

====================

© March 2015

The Blackbirds

Three blackbirds in the grey-dull day
Chased themselves through the tree’s bare splay,
Again, again, like kittens feigning,
They sped and spatted in mock complaining;
Throughout the tree like motes they spun,
Then perched at peace, their jaunting done.

For days the maple’s brown-bone crown

Was criss-crossed by their ups and down;
February winds and rains were piercing,
But still they bounced in deft rehearsing
For March and April’s balmier days
When pastime fun turns warrior ways.

For then with mate and chicks to feed

These blackbirds scouring tree and mead
Will have no truck with ploughshare things,
With hop and skip and wag of wings;
Urgent to fledge there’ll be no playing
Only ambush and noisy ’fraying.

====================

© February 2015

In Sickness

   At four in the morning
   Day is not dawning
But the robin is glooming his song,
   Pitch-dark surrounded,
   Sounding astounded
That dawn is taking so long.

   Through my feverish dreaming

   His stutter is streaming
Like someone tapping a gong;
   By illness bewounded
   My fretting abounded
That February’s frosts are long.

   But come the year’s brimming

   When the robin is hymning
And life and limb are strong,
   My spirits rebounded
   And ill-thoughts ungrounded,
Summer’s healths will be long!

====================
© February 2015
 

Wood Chipper

Strong swathes of holly branch
Green-glinting in the sun,
Aspark with berry spots,
Were chainsawed, tranche by tranche;
They collapsed as if spun
By a tirade of shots.

Manhandled to the road,

The chipper primed to run,
They were fed to its teeth;
A stream of chips like blood,
Oscillating and dun,
Sprayed the deep bin beneath.

Man’s life is like that stream,

Flung like fumes from a gun,
Melded but knocked apart
When death’s cave traps its beam,
Brain and brute limbs undone
To dust in the charnel cart.

====================
© February 2015