And So

And so I sat me down to write:
Such fear and scorn, such bit-hard hate,
Had drilled my chest with gouge and bite
That wave-swelled anger poured in spate.

A Christian culture quite destroyed,

Invading satraps rack the land;
Displaced, my rooted life made void,
I drift the badlands’ bush and sand.

That which I was or wished to be,

Heart’s tangle with a sweet-life mate,
Were spoiled by coup, made worse by me,
Reduced to scratchings on a slate.

Now youth is gone and age conspires,

Bent bones and sweepings no one wants,
A world in self like untuned lyres
Is flung to scrap with thrones and fonts.

Oh, rage indeed whilst rage you can:

Mind-sore, these dunes my polity,
I squat in reeds and boil my bran,
Defunct beside the snarling sea.

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© October 2015

Judgement

Decades ago I wrote a number of other short poems on similar themes. Here are links to three: "Who Can Interpret a Broken Branch" written March 1980 and posted here on 6 March 2013; "A Siren Calling in the Night" written December 1980 and posted here on 12 December 2012, and "The All" written January 1981 and posted here on 31 December 2011.

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On such and such a night I died,
It was not sickness, it was pride,
Like Satan plunging to the sea
I leapt Your rampart and chose me.

And now in selfish coal-dust dark

I whimper like a wing-broke lark,
I scorned what You were like to do
And choosing me, made You choose You.

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© September 2015

All Weather

He had come to the end of his tether
After years of deep wrestling with fate,
   Each morning, noon, gloaming and night,
      All weather,
   Schemes had failed and nothing gone right,
He was left in despair feeling hate
For all women and men and their blether.

Through long decades of office-trapped dither,

Little liked, charismatic as slate,
   He yearned to walk out and take flight,
      But whither?
   Weakly-dowered, fitfully-bright,
With no stomach for throwing his weight,
Lost of hope, he fumed hither and thither.

As for love and its flirt, fickle feather,

He had scoured bar and street for a mate,
   Those joustings half-lust and half-spite,
      All weather!
   But bescorned, his passions in blight,
With a child who adjudged him third-rate,
He had coarsened like bile-blackened leather.

Now at age, all that sag, all that slither!

Bitter-mouthed, shabby dressed, slouch of gait,
   All joy had sailed off like a kite,
      But whither?
   How he seethed at worldly despite!
Outside shops, children side-eyed his state
Like a street beggar striking his zither.

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© August 2015

Spes Unica

By way of comparison here is a link to 'Three Searching Sonnets' written in January 1983 and posted here on 2 April 2012.

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Lines 1, 5 and 9 are taken from Psalm 83 (Douay-Rheims)
 
How lovely are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts!
Endraped and candled, glanced by incense mist,
In pin-drop dark, That which made peaks and coasts,
Cupped, bulks with power of its Three-love tryst.

My soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord:

On flags, limb-twisted men with breaths which hissed,
Kneeling paid homage to that niche, its hoard;
Something-in-nothing leant and each one kissed.

My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the living God,

Sipped the eternal in each moment’s plash
Fountained from that pyx of well-head food;
Pain is indecent, as is death’s sore gash,
But springs the sluices of the Lord’s rich Blood
In which at last we sink and, thankful, wash.

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© August 2015
 

The Shadow

His shadow on the frosty ground
Was stark-etched by the autumn sun
And stepped before him, morning-browned,
With old man movements, lamely done;
   With shock he saw that shadow’s lines
   Crosshatch a body much reduced.

Slope-shouldered, thin and dragging-stepped,

Lacking the bulk which once it had,
Bent-legged and stiff the shadow crept
The tarmac with a crablike pad;
   Heartstruck, he scanned those bitter signs
   Of big-stride swagger now traduced.

What purpose then had life and love,

That courtship like a sweet-toned flute,
The skelter games of tease and shove,
And mid-life prize of flesh-thick fruit;
   (Life-lazing, gorged, in shade of vines,
   He dozed in heat like one seduced)?

But now the swift cloud, blue-glazed sky,

The green-piled sea and field-rich land,
Had spewed him forth; his shadow’s cry
Was look to self, time’s leaking sand,
   And fling off living, seek out shrines
   Where truth is found, by death induced.
 

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© August 2015
 
 

The Herring Gull

   I watched a herring gull,
      A juvenile,
   Dig in the shingle pile
      At tide’s lull;
      It found a snail
   And vainly prised at it,
   That flesh in the shell’s pail
Unshifted by each shake or hit.
      Dancing-shrill,
   That gull on flung-out wings
   Rose in the salt air’s slings,
   The snail clutched in its bill,
   Then hurled it on the stones –
      I heard the “clack”;
Four times it soared in the wind’s groans
      To make attack.
      The shell split
   At last; seizing the meat,
      With a wing’s beat
   The gull veered to a spit,
   Green-weeded, running-wet,
   To gulp its prize, unmobbed
By other gulls. The wind’s fret
   Flurried, and the tide bobbed.
      That brown-flecked gull,
   Lean-young and screech of breath,
   Had parried hunger’s pull:
Daily he starves or metes out death.

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© July 2015