Cleanliness

Michelangelo sometimes neither undressed nor even took of his boots to sleep so caught up was he in his work. Auden famously disconcerted his college's senior common room by proclaiming his use of the humble sink. Many penitents recorded that the saintly Seraphim's face would glow like the sun.

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

Michelangelo in
Boots and paint-dabbed smocking
Lay himself to slumber,
Nightwear all forsworn;
Neither soap nor toothscrub
Struck him as important
When creation’s moment
Seized him like the dawn.

Cleanliness, the preachers
Chant, is kissing-close to
Godliness; hence, maiden
Aunts in underwear
Fresh each day, make volta
Knowing that if car-struck
Death will find their undies
Pure as mountain air.

Medieval kings were
Sewn into their garments,
Winter’s frozen months to
Bear in smelly gloom;
Ladies likewise: he who
Held the patent reaped as
Kings gave audience and
Nosegays packed the room.

Still, though, baths and showers
Freak both lord and tenant,
Water quite upsets our
Dirt-grained status quo;
Gels and steam and soap suds,
Body scrubs and pumice,
Froth and fluffy towels,
Dry the skin out so!

Writers in especial,
Drunk, suspicious, debt-struck,
Grubby linen whiffing,
Know that pen and ink
Pardon many foibles:
Auden made a poet’s
Polis from mere words though
Pissing in the sink.

Desert fathers also
Scorned all cleansing potions,
Fed on cabbage water,
Fasting unto grace;
Seraphim of Sarov’s
Flea-infested blanket
Made a royal threshold
For his God-glow face.

Strangely, man – God’s image –
Sweaty, mouthy, fat-hung,
Fizzing brain half-sunk in
Exculpating sin,
Vision of the One is
Vouchsafed gratis though he’s
Crowned by hair bedraggled,
Stained by ringwormed skin.

====================
© May 2017

Time's Arrow

Time’s arrow deathward delves,
None are left behind on shelves,
Beetles, curlew, bare-faced man,
Cannot stop what birth began –

Pairing, getting, toil at nest,
Shrugging spawn to east and west,
Loss of poise, then dulling eyes:
Something strikes and snaps your cries.

First, though, man with “ought” and “is”
Limps the world whose faults are his,
Beauty goads him, stings the good,
Raged, he slaughters for his food.

But at last the cosmos ends,
Black holes leach and nothing mends,
Heat death starves in deepest dark,
Silence touch-walks through the ark.

====================
© March 2017

Thwarted Love

I said to my soul be still, be still,
If God doesn’t want you, the devil will;
In love there’s always a kiss or a dart,
And both are frenzied as a broken heart.

And if love decays and scorn obtrudes,
Furious as whirlwinds or vipers’ broods,
There’s few who can bluster a stiff-lipped shrug,
Far less a kind word and a parting hug.

For passions broke loose will shred up the clouds
And rip apart mountains like nail-torn shrouds,
And stamped on, disgraced, in the stone-filled mud
The lover’s pale likeness will blacken like blood.

I said to my soul be still, be still,
If God doesn’t want you, the devil will;
Dragged to the judgement, to curse or to bless,
Your tight-ribbed “no” is the devil’s “yes.”

====================
© February 2017

In Forest Glades

Well, I will not claim this as one of the world's finest poems (!) but I have a sneaking liking for it.

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

In forest glades
Where lichened seats
Commemorate
   Old maids,

And autumn braids
With berry sweets
Hang soon and late
   In shades,

The year’s light fades,
The birds in bleats
Lament their fate
   Like jades,

Each seat degrades
In frosts, in heats,
Like shrouded, strait,
   Old maids.

====================
© December 2016

Morality

To find one honest truth to say,
   And an honest way to say it,
As if one plunged the Milky Way
   To pluck a new planet,

Is of tasks, even though we pray
   Or sing as does the linnet,
As hard as clutching sea-mad spray
   In the decisive minute.

We are conscience-harried clay
   Though garrotters without merit,
And white coat theories or faith’s hooray
   Cannot empearl that grit.

Yet vicious in the pre-storm grey,
   Sweated in sin’s transit,
A tyrant eyes a child at play
   And longs to hug it.

Such glints of sunlight, gold on hay,
   Bode forth a blood-felt tenet;
Life’s years are blanched by day and day,
   Living, dying, to know it.

====================
© October 2016

Underneath the Weeping Willow

Underneath the weeping willow
   Lover weep no more,
Only death and tax are certain,
   Love is either/or.

Yesterday’s hot shout of joy,
   Lips to lips engaged,
Will tomorrow shrink to scorn,
   Words become unpaged.

Heart-struck loss but burns the stubble,
   Lifestyle gurus hint,
Fallow land fresh shoots will throw,
   Sun on furrows glint.

Facebook page and LinkedIn profile,
   Speed dates and the like,
Soon make lovers, (or for poets,
   A workshop's "open mic").

Sexting, smutty mobile chats –
   Modern love is crass –
Capture hearts as yesteryear
   Flowers for the lass.

None are modest, none might blush,
   Words entwist like snakes,
Mirrored images we are,
   Then the mirror breaks.

Underneath the weeping willow
   Lover weep no more,
Deep as oceans, pure as air,
   Love is neither/nor.

====================
© September 2016

For those who prefer more contemporary images I can offer, for the penultimate stanza, the following:

None are modest, none might blush,
   Texted words are snakes,
Flat screen, one-shot stars we are,
   Then the flat screen breaks.

"There is Nothing More Louche..."

Kant and Sophocles speak for themselves. Bernard Häring was a moral theologian who advocated a personalist approach to moral situations which inevitably tended towards subjectivism and relativism (not to my taste, thank you); John Rawles' famous book 'A Theory of Justice' contained his equally famous thought experiment of the 'Veil of Ignorance.'

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

There is nothing more louche than the passing of years
   – Ho! for the blood tests, the grudged faecal smears,
Then it’s drooping of flesh and thin rheumy leers,

The hospital beds, care home chairs, and then biers.

All that work-place role play and promotion in tiers
   – Ho! for the politics, the sales meeting jeers;
The marriages, maintenance and children’s hot fears
Collapsing in hatred and screeched primal sneers.

Might Kant in his wig chart a way through these meres?
   – Ho! for imperatives and love for one’s peers;
Or Häring or Rawles with two cautious cheers
Anaesthetize tragedy with a fondling of ears?

Oh, age-spare Sophocles like a mist which clears
   – Ho! for those cold-eyed ones, truth-shaken seers,
Saw grimly that men with their loves and their spears
Are flung from their feet and swept over time’s weirs.

====================
© August 2016

John Davidson and I

Famously, the poet John Davidson decamped to Penzance in the far west, depressed at his poverty and lack of success. On 23 March 1909 he went into the Star Inn (still there) on Market Jew Street and bought a final whisky and cigar. Then he walked off towards the promenade (the only Victorian prom in Cornwall) and was never seen alive again. Some months later his badly decomposed body was found in Mounts Bay by local fishermen.

   He is often thought of now as the epitome of a bad failed poet but he was no such thing. I was greatly delighted years ago to discover his ballads and lyrics which are the work of a very skilled writer. Perhaps his later epics are more of an acquired taste.

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

So, John Davidson, it’s you and I,
   Failing, disabused and ill,
Grey, in tatters like the April sky,
   Rarely joyful, always chill.

Mounts Bay rackets with a full spring tide
   Leaping in the spray-wet air,
Beached, the grey-blanched stones are soaked then dried,
   Fissured by their salt-sharp wear.

Life and love in ballast drove me west,
   Here to wallow like a wreck,
Rather, money’s pinch and critics’ jest
   Forced you to this wind-struck beck:

Wayward tracks like ropes of circumstance
   Bundling travellers to their knees;
Cowed at meaning’s threshold, chance on chance,
   Each was robbed of all self-ease;

Worse for you, possessing self in power,
   Who like Nietzsche, tensed in thought,
Bloomed in corners like a thistle flower
   Starved of that acclaim you sought.

Matter, sole in being, tricked out man,
   Death, you thought, was thus release;
I, in quanta, mind, a theophan,
   Reason found, and not caprice.

Soul-sore, evening dark, you quit the “Star,”
   Whisky-vigoured for the prom,
Full tide set the thrashing waves to war,
   Screaming, they became your tomb.

Months were shriven; your body found horizoned,
   Sunk was given rest; that mesh
Strung of bones and cloth, gone melt and wizened,
   Mocked your creed with stinking flesh.

I, like you, in solitary end
   Longed to quiz the brute-faced waves;
Carnal trust, though bodies age and bend,
   Paused me, whilst the world behaves.

But at last, past death’s breath-frantic sweat,
   Being’s time-shed Present will
Knowledge proffer and its bliss abet,
   Stifling sorrow’s broil to nil.

====================
© June 2016

Murphy in His Rocking Chair

I wrote the first part and the first four couplets of the second part in May 2016; the last ten couplets were written in July 2017.

   Murphy is the eponymous hero of Samuel Beckett's early novel. Being typically Beckett it is funny and very strange. Murphy spends his days naked and strapped in a rocking chair trying to achieve a state of non-being.

   In a previous recent poem, "Genealogy," posted on 12 April 2021 (here) I had tried to encapsulate the thought of a range of thinkers (including Jesus Christ who is much more than that) in the Western tradition in quatrains. I wanted to try doing the same again but in couplets using alexandrines, and used Murphy on which to hang them.

   Decades ago in February 1980 I had written "Descartes at Dinner Darkly Said" which handled similar material but concentrated on Descartes, Berkeley, Russell and Spinoza. I posted it on 27 August 2012; it is linked here.

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

I.

Ah, the sun’s heat sizzles the pane,
And I must seek my Phase again,
Strapped upon this frame:
Naked to the searing air,
How stiff my flesh, how loath my name,
   Said Murphy in his rocking chair.

Come death, its foul or glib mishap,
Embroiled, I’ll deliquesce to sap,
Puddling in these bands;
Dried by months which pass like prayer,
That dust will strew to cornered sands,
   Said Murphy in his rocking chair.

Swept out by landlords quick to let,
My dust will roll in the wind’s jet,
Settling like a frost,
Earth-inhumed with bone and hair
In gardens that the self be lost,
   Said Murphy in his rocking chair.

Then molecules once mine, or not,
Will mesh with others to a clot
Moulding beans or fruit;
Fed to one below the stair
He’ll spring an agon boy, though mute,
   Said Murphy in his rocking chair.

And grown, fast-roped within the arms
Of some new chair, refusing psalms,
Treadmill-like he’ll rock,
Laved in sweat, his glassy stare
Outdistancing the ticking clock,
   Said Murphy in his rocking chair.

II.

Heraclitus grabbed the water with his hand,
Untameable, it spilled in dancings to the sand.

Parmenides at goddess-call approached her cell,
He stumbled but surmised he neither stepped nor fell,

      Sang Murphy in his rocking chair.

Plato, despairing, slapped and shook a thousand chairs
Then found in heaven a Form which purified his prayers.

Aristotle crawled in dust around his yard,
He prodded ants and droppings, looking very hard,

      Sang Murphy in his rocking chair.

Moses, sun-parched in the desert, rasped the Law,
His tough-skinned tribes closed ranks, a bone for God to gnaw.

Christ, cross-hung, cauterized the world, and from His grave
Rose to insist that blood-and-hormone men behave,

      Sang Murphy in his rocking chair.

Descartes distilled the soul’s free airs and strained them through
A gland to oil the body’s crankshafts like a dew.

Newton grinding lenses, plotted planets’ tracks,
Equationed clockwork symmetry, though there were cracks,

      Sang Murphy in his rocking chair.

Darwin plucked a toe-spread lizard from a stone,
And complex man stood up and thought, but with a groan.

Einstein tugged space-time like a thick sheet of dough,
Made matter somersault and time go fast or slow,

      Sang Murphy in his rocking chair.

Bohr pierced the atom’s darkest ooze to draw a chart – 
The quanta dodged like three-card tricksters at a mart.

Monod watched his fusing chemicals collide,
He crooned for spirits though might just as well have cried,

      Sang Murphy in his rocking chair.

Truth is glimpsed in a half smile and broken bread,
It’s in the throb which binds, the sun’s at-gloaming red:

Petri dish and cursor woo the “how?” and gone,
But “why?” which wrings the desert men, goes ever on,

      Sang Murphy in his rocking chair.

====================
© May 2016 - July 2017

Song

It’s ancient loves that ache the hardest,
It’s long-lost loves that throb the most,
The young in self-woe quite the proudest
Soon perk and chase another boast.

But age which glims like some faint ghost
Only recalls those years the saddest
When time by some girl’s face engrossed
Was endless and its joy was loudest.

Now tears and sickness, all that’s rudest,
Batter your ebb sands like a coast,
Those loves bestrew your grave the widest
Which gapes to be their death-deep host.

====================
© May 2016

Truths

Here are links to three other ballads of mine: "The Lilies of the Valley" written in 1979 and posted here on 1 March 2012; "Mr Longley's Dream" written in 1980 and posted here on 9 May 2013; and "A Penzance Ballad" written in 2013 and posted here on 2 March 2015. 

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

Hist! It’s a night of oil-black cloud,
   And the wind it screeched like stoats,
The rain it dug my face with nails
   And streamed on my flapping coats.

The ways and alleys of Penzance town
   Were dark as a deep-shaft mine,
Aflash of an instant with a wind-shook lamp
   Then thick like a cloudy wine.

In a granite arch where echoes groaned
   And shadows boiled like broth,
I met a man with ice-hard eyes
   And a grin like the devil’s wrath.

He’s gaunt and fissured like a sea-soused log
   Thrown up on the grey sand beach,
He’s hung in black and hugs a text
   As if with truths to teach.

“I know a man,” says he, sneers he,
   “A lickspittle all his years,
“Battened a louse on dame and wife,
   “On child, and drank their tears.

“Oh, he strutted it, his hand to th’pump,
   “Squire, tenant and field hand in one,
“Staff to all, as fat meat on bread,
   “Or the corn-stirring heat of the sun.

“But he’s runt within, a lacklust cur,
   “Fawning, wet-chopped, plead-eyed,
“Clawing for petting, for morsels, for thanks,
   “And, short-changed, quick to chide.

“Like plague-hagged fleas he jumped his berths,
   “Mad-hurt by word or look,
“And gorged in the warmth of his new love’s shift
   “Forgot the loves he forsook.

“Now he’s old and rejected, crabbed by loss,
   “And shambles by day or night
“The cobbles and flags of Penzance town,
   “Damning others’ wrongs with his right.”

I snubbed that shadowed man’s hoarse words
   And shouldered on my way,
The rain it clattered in gutters and spouts
   And the gulls groaned in the spray.

Later, in thought, I ate my bit
   And, peevish, drank my draught:
Oh, what is that whisper in the wind-cold hall
   As if a demon laughed?

Then, climbing the stairs to rest, I passed
   A mirror and screamed to see,
Faint in the dark with his fissured face,
   That fatal man: it was me.

====================
© May 2016

Meaning

Dismas (to be precise St Dismas) is the good thief upon the cross to whom the Lord said, "Amen, I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise." (Luke 23: 43.)

   I thought this poem had a resemblance to one of my earlier poems, "Spring and Meaning," (posted on 21 November 2016) but on examination it doesn't. Here's a link anyway.

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

“I’ve never been troubled with dyspepsia,” Gerald drawled untruthfully. Professor Clun looked at him sharply. “No?” he said, “I’m inclined in general to regard it as the inevitable malady of any serious or lengthy application to study.” (Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes)

He sits in strife, the literary man,
Welted with sins, with squabbles, with amours,
His desk a battle with a half-felt plan
To seize tracts of meaning with press-ganged words;
His helps to craft, his pills and good luck paws,
Jostle his laptop with its tenth-thought drafts;
Despondent in wrestle, his bowels in curds,
His taut back sears him like infected grafts.

But having mastered, his agent’s plaudits won,
Why the self-seething in a whisky glass?
His words, breathless at the market’s starting gun,
Shun knowledge that skilled scribbling’s a fake reward
Except it glow with beauty of the vase
Flower-aflame in spring, self-bodying
Being’s fact and by its otherness awed;
Piecework redeemed by art, a shouldering.

Adequacy to truth, that’s to be saved;
So Yeats was bludgeoned by his whiplash nerves,
And Conrad jack-knifed whilst his headaches raved.
And Darwin, icon-slayer though a drudge,
Spatchcocked landlub tortoise, worms in turves,
And wrenched by painings, tempted since his youth,
Laid bare with the forensics of a judge
The beauty and efficiency of truth.

All art, all men, like Dismas on the cross,
Pinioned in pain and deadweight of their faults,
Turn gasping to the emblem of their loss
Craving its standfast meaning which alone
Balms treacheries and self-hate’s bitter salts,
Those lifelong, squalid hours upon the tree:
Each poem or mind-work on which truth has blown,
Did it but know, cries, “Lord, remember me.”

====================
© April 2016

The End is Nigh

The stanzas are linked by the common rhyme in each line six. For the use of the legal term "tort" in the second stanza I appeal to Spenser: "For no wild beasts should do them any torte."

   The final stanza recalls an incident when as a child I unwarily stood on a weed-covered step and the next moment found myself waist deep in the River Thames. Indeed, my father came running to yank me out, and indeed he was dead at an early age a mere ten years later of a heart attack.

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

As carping seagulls with a scythe of wings
Will swoop and dodge above some lusted scrap,
So I life-long made turn and flung my cap
At detoured baubles, glib that time’s fresh springs
Would always well with drop-flash chance like spray,
So that at choice I’d know myself and be
That man, that gift, I’d always longed one day.

But now in age the punch-struck fighter in
The ring has foul-guessed himself to the ropes;
Pummelled to ribs he knows his toe-danced tropes
Are helpless, the Reaper thrashing chin to chin;
Fullness of self cannot be seized or thought,
Drained, there’s no future like the spread-armed tree,
There’s only death, an unknown hence, for tort.

Truly, the end is nigh. Those forceful young,
Bustling in splendour of diploma’d craft,
Doctor, optician, professional-laughed,
Treat age with child-talk brusqueness of the tongue,
Shied by its sour-whiff flesh and slow-tread mind;
For them, life’s a dance floor, a strobe light spree:
One day they’ll find what all who die must find.

Slipping, a child sinks, river-drenched, and screams;
Chiding, my father strides and drags me out,
But ten years gone, he sudden died, my shout
Of loss killed self and now I drench in dreams.
Waist-deep in sorrow, let my end be mild;
Raging and blaming forced my loves to flee;
At death’s last lodging be it said I smiled.

====================
© March 2016

A Farewell

Uncle Giles (final stanza) is the lifelong ne'er do well in Anthony Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time,'  living in boarding houses and low cost hotels.

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

The heart is perverse above all things, and unsearchable, who can know it?
(Jeremias xvii, 9)

That child you loved and lost is gone; let go!
A woman grown and fifteen years
Adrift, her teen-formed status quo,
Life-fashioned in my lack, if met would be
Inscrutable, like runes without a key;
More so, for loss-hurt with an ice-crabbed soul
Through years of exile, craving signs,
I soured like late-frost vines
And loves and friendships with a glare made foul,
And now in age, hugging my broken spears,
I creep a bankrupt, rich in tears.

And should we meet, with pre-judged frowns, we’d find
That even hot-veined blood, gone crank,
No longer linked, that we, once kind,
Now, truth to tell, were dead, each prey to each;
For all that’s felt decays, this pith to teach,
That love’s icon is but a thing of straw,
Mere memory which frays to chaff,
Till lost in baffled wrath
There’s no recall of what she said or wore,
Only self-scorn that, lulled, I stooped and drank
And thus exposed a soft-flesh flank.

Well, folk but decades past knew all of loss,
Of childhood deaths and fever’s fire,
Or sent their children, still in gloss,
To trade or service come eleven years;
And so for me: that child may give me heirs
But I’d not want to hear she’s court and wed
As afterthought once all was done,
For families I shun –
Their close talk, cohort-cleave and common bread:
Like Uncle Giles in rooms and shab attire
I’ll bide my days and stack my pyre.

====================
© March 2016

Lichened Pavements

This is trochaic apart from line 8. It seems often the case that a strand of thought in trochaics ends up naturally in an iambic line.

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

Lichened pavements in the winter sun,
Emerald-yellow, dewdrop bright,
Glow like gauze which the spiders spun,
Flashed by the sun’s cold morning light.

Orange-startling like a bloodshot eye,
Flinging shadow from its horizon’s poise,
Warmth exuding in the icy sky,
The sun’s silence is a sort of noise.

Finger-shadows stroke the ground,
Green-gleam lichen swells and spreads;
Kneeling, I studied each rift and mound,
Worlds in tiny on kerbs and treads:

Grass-stained sawdust with stems and fronds,
3-D bulk with mites a’run,
Forest-dense – all boughs and wands,
Flecked with grey, flame-red and dun.

Living, thickening, by years undaunt,
Sponge-piling pavements each season passed,
Glint with frost-melt, this lichen will flaunt,
Thriving still when my grave is grassed.

====================
© March 2016

The Old Man

The entire poem should have been written in February 2015 but flu intervened; by the time I had the energy to continue it was May and it seemed silly writing about deep winter in the burgeoning Spring. Therefore I waited to February 2016 to write the second part. Of course, the person writing and the theme had changed a bit since 2015; perhaps the different emphases can be felt in the second part.

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

A ghost in life is passing by
Ignored in presence like a sigh.
Drag-footed, dusty, freight with years,
Sag-skinned, fog-eyed, with clothes in smears,
I shambled pavements frosted grey
One February freezing day
As mothers with their bawling young
Raced buggies with their shopping hung,
Anxious to reach the warmth of home
And wipe those faces’ grime and rheum.
To those young women, task-befraught,
I was an eye-edge, old-clothed nought,
Of no concern to dashing, feeding,
Early playgroups, early reading;
Street clutter that as well might be
The bare trunk of a winter tree.
Of parenthood, the joys, the sorrow,
Have sidestepped me like last year’s morrow:
The very children, buggy-couched,
In blankets, hats and mittens pouched,
Dismissed me with a through-see eye
Like chub-faced satraps sweeping by.
Just one or two their self-love ceased,
Their mewling paused, their fat eyes creased,
Struck by my one substantial note,
A bulbous beard from lip to throat
Billowing white like old Saint Nick’s,
Which summoned up a few faint flicks
Of memory that recently,
So parents said, one such as I
Had slithered roofs and ice-hard drifts
To creep through rooms and bring forth gifts.

But on the instant, eye-light dulled
And Buddha-like uninterest nulled
The quick glance between them and I;
Their buggies sped past on the fly
As mothers rushed, and naught was left
But waning backs: it felt like theft.

Genealogy

This is a 'genealogy' of those parts of Western (and hence the world's most important) thought which seem crucial to me. There is no place for Marx (a minor dead-end derivative of Hegel) or Freud (a mere artist rather than a philosopher/enquirer) - and certainly none for post- and post-post-modernists. Incidentally, I too am a mere artist; I do not have a great opinion of the breed.

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

   A man is many-minded
And so the first philosopher:
   To start, in myths was blinded,
A butter-tongued récitateur.

   Democritus set atoms
A’flinging like the abacus,
   From this came self-hug patterns
Which spun themselves in knots to us.

   And Heraclitus, grim,
Proclaimed knee-deep in matter’s river
   That all was flux; for him
Life was a fugue upon the zither.

   Parmenides dismissed
Such airs convinced that nothing changed;
   What was was one, a cyst
Of being, unmotioned, unimpinged.

   Then Plato’s pandect thought
Put men in caves and Forms above;
   The sooth-eyed few, he taught,
Should the Republic’s herd betruth.

   But Aristotle knelt,
Stared starkly at the gist of things,
   Pondered why sweet herbs smelt
And why ground-running birds had wings.

   Elsewhere rough Moses marched
His tribes to swell in Nebo’s view;
   Milk, honey for the parched,
But also Law, thorn of the True.

   Christ brought to crux all this,
Stretched-armed seizer of times and place,
   Purified the world’s kiss,
Its what and why in His bruised face.

   Later, Aquinas wove
Tart Gospels and philosophy
   To show the struts of Love
Which pinned Creation’s jewel and sty.

   At length, Descartes’ “I am”
Proclaimed the individual,
   That thought machine whose frame
Was mind-geared through the pineal.

   And Newton turned the planets
And the dropped apple in his mind,
   Quantified all their habits
And mass to clockwork laws consigned.

   Came Hegel, dour like snow,
Convinced the world’s work had a goal,
   That man and thought must grow
To the self-knowing of world soul.

   Darwin exploded all;
His finches, flags of fecund chance,
   Self-grew through push and pull
Of parlous food and hot-flesh wants.

   So Nietzsche screamed that God
And man’s mere rational thought are dead,
   And Zarathustra trod
With Will on good and evil’s head.

   Then Einstein, placid-eyed,
Equation-led, made relative
   Space-time, and cosmos-wide
Linked each to all with light-speed’s weave.

   Heidegger rescued Being,
Enworlded and defined by death;
   Through truth-told self-descrying
Its thrown work is both wreath and sheaf.

   But Bohr in deep-root physics
Found quanta, waves, shape-shifting states;
   The probable had fidgets
And dodged when probed by lab-men’s lights.

   Last, Monod made summation
That man is thinking chemistry,
   A freak absurd mutation
Lacking all point or destiny.

   So, in a thrash of atoms
Torn by unchanging ruthless flux,
   Man wrestles in the fathoms
Seeking a handhold on the rocks.

   Among the dunes a cave,
Inside, a shelf with Cross and rose:
   What makes the world behave,
Blind force or Mind? The hermit chose.

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© February 2016

Penwith Sea

Penwith is the most westerly part of Cornwall, with Penzance as its main town. Wherry Town is the small area and beach on the west of Penzance, leading into the fishing port of Newlyn. Penlee Point is west of Newlyn on the way to Mousehole.

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   The sea is many-mooded,
A grey and restless sojourner,
   Like weather fronts occluded,
Part lout and part philosopher.

   At Wherry Town it’s mild,
Innocuous like warming gruel,
   But will seize a thoughtless child
And drown it in a knee-deep pool.

   At Penlee Point it’s wild,
Striking the cliff with land-shake shocks;
   A boat by it beguiled
Will splinter, torn upon the rocks.

   Like any Tar at sprawl,
Half-drunk it puts the jug about;
   A wink – there’s fish in trawl,
A snarl – and widows’ lights go out.

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© January 2016

Snow Stuns All

Sunday 17 January 2016, 8.30 am

Snow stuns all:
Black-wet earth,
Bark-soaked limes,
Mist-blanched bush,
Ice-crisped grass,
Haunt-hunched birds,
Melt-dripped roofs,
White-stretched streets,
Noise-mute cars,
Grey-lumped sky,
Lead-weight sea,
Freeze-breath man,
Life-death’s gasp:
Snow stuns all.

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© January 2016

Europe Blues

I stride to my desk in the mornings

To study absicht and donnée,
But soon I take pause to consider
Herr Professeur has little to say.
        Oh the gruff good sense of Old England.

Come evening I twirl my spaghetti
Or dabble a thin Tuscan wine,
But really I find it’s all rat food
Not hearty and struck from the chine.
        Oh the ale and roast beef of Old England.

On Sundays I turn to my Maker
To acknowledge good fortune received,
But appalled at thought of the priest-hagged
I give thanks for what Cranmer achieved.
        Oh the matins and psalms of Old England.

And sometimes I struggle with paroles
Or drang which a dichter has sung,
But they clog my exasperate vision
Like chaff which madmen have flung.
        Oh the part-songs and tales of Old England.

Thank God for these green rocky islands,
For the wolds and the homesteads and lanes,
Though now swarming with Europe’s children
Like a locust army of Cains.
        Oh the fair fields and towns of Old England.

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Note: "Herr Professeur" is deliberate.

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© January 2016

David Varney

"David Varney" - I changed his name - was indeed annoying! But his end, a lonely wanderer of the streets, was sad. The poem makes obvious reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Felix Randal" and, perhaps less obviously but important to me, Yeats's "Paudeen." One of those little poetic felicities occurred in the writing when I found that the rhyme sound of lines 9 and 11 in the first stanza was repeated in the same lines in the second stanza.

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David Varney, the shop help, ah is he dead?
Tiresome, he’d dog your side with gibbous eyes
And purchase patter – words, but nothing said,
Squabbling the while with staff like boys at shies.
Put out by management he limped the streets
With heavy coat and hat and plastic bags;
Years passed, a pulled-down shade with scowls and bleats
He dredged recycling bins, collecting rags.
Last seen on Christmas Eve, a bitter nought
Among the glee, I heard by New Year’s Day
He’d died; who knows if he sweet ransom sought
Before that sea change from his heavy clay?

How do the unendearing find their peace,
The crank, the spiteful or the blank as snow?
That’s you, that’s me. At death, each growth, each crease
Of soul is polished like a glacier’s flow.
Cold light, a curlew’s cry are metaphors
For the Sun’s burning which expels all trash,
So that the billionth person, once in sores,
Is purified in an eternal flash.
That sear of light, made simple as a thought,
Becomes an offering to That which gives,
And David Varney, who in life was fraught,
Beyond all being, now in Being lives.

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© January 2016