The first part is iambic with half-rhymes. In the second part, the lines alternate between trochaic and iambic tetrameters; and there are half-rhymes in the second and fourth etc lines.
----------
i.
Bouquets, Easter bouquets, full-bodied, frothing;
Or deep-drift snow, bundled on tumbling fells.
Late April sun: the hawthorn trees amass
Themselves in blossom, jogged by wind-coughs roughing
Their branch-piled opulence. What pictured grace!
Thorned though, like life, by shards beneath their swells.
ii.
Brazen, puerile, urchins cheeking
Though poised to dash, this hawthorn blossom,
Clout by April’s winds, is fragile
Like street boys thin and hunger-lissom.
Begging hands, five-fingered petals,
Accost, cupped palms whited for alms;
Bees will trample, nectar-dizzy,
Grappling the cressy stamens’ combs,
Meting pollen onto stigmas’
Lank finger, bobbed with a fecund head,
Poised to fuse. Like waifs it stews
A scent, half gutter-smirch, half plied
Muskings of the young on heat,
Lewdly accoutred by the leaves’
Phthisic veilings, panders to
The season’s fruiting. Cluttered troves!
Ramp with spring’s few-moment tinture:
Skin-white, quease-green, lips’ fleshy mauve,
Sulphur yellow, pale as gruel:
This blossom orphans’-lust, to live.
====================
© April 2019
Monday 15 August 2022
At Seventy
I wrote this morsel on a single rhyme six months before the great event. Presumably I was looking forward to it. What a mistake!
--------
We all to the grave must dash,
Whip, pizzle and lash,
Some fraught with cash,
Some having made a hash,
Some who in business were brash,
Some who simply went smash.
Some gone bald with a ’tash
Who feared to propose then crash,
Those who never had a pash –
They tried but turned it all to ash:
Ah, passion’s lovely tinkling plash!
(What are wrists for but to slash?)
Some there were who loved to clash,
Some there were who couldna fash,
And some who in a murderous flash
Did something very rash.
There’s some who scribbled balderdash,
And those content to rehash,
Some whose work was a toppling stash
But never much more than trash.
There’s some (ah, grief) who forced Pandora’s cache,
Fracturing the world with a livid gash.
All done, some will wear an angel’s sash
At the Father’s blissful Zion bash,
But many will howl and gnash,
Drowned in the devil’s gall-and-splash.
====================
© April 2019
--------
We all to the grave must dash,
Whip, pizzle and lash,
Some fraught with cash,
Some having made a hash,
Some who in business were brash,
Some who simply went smash.
Some gone bald with a ’tash
Who feared to propose then crash,
Those who never had a pash –
They tried but turned it all to ash:
Ah, passion’s lovely tinkling plash!
(What are wrists for but to slash?)
Some there were who loved to clash,
Some there were who couldna fash,
And some who in a murderous flash
Did something very rash.
There’s some who scribbled balderdash,
And those content to rehash,
Some whose work was a toppling stash
But never much more than trash.
There’s some (ah, grief) who forced Pandora’s cache,
Fracturing the world with a livid gash.
All done, some will wear an angel’s sash
At the Father’s blissful Zion bash,
But many will howl and gnash,
Drowned in the devil’s gall-and-splash.
====================
© April 2019
Wren
A draggled wren upon the path
Cried, “When?
January freezes and months must pass
Till Spring shoot bud again.
“All day I creep through hedge and grass
For grubs and ticks in ken,
Goaded by hunger I shout and fuss
When startled by tramping men.
“And I’ll brashly sing to catch a lass
And get with clutch that hen –
Squabbling chicks of voice and pith,
Toughened for life en plein.
“Brute cat, cold crow and sidling kith
All prowl my hedge and fen,
I’ll face them in a scolding huff,
A three-inch bawling wren!”
====================
© March 2019
Cried, “When?
January freezes and months must pass
Till Spring shoot bud again.
“All day I creep through hedge and grass
For grubs and ticks in ken,
Goaded by hunger I shout and fuss
When startled by tramping men.
“And I’ll brashly sing to catch a lass
And get with clutch that hen –
Squabbling chicks of voice and pith,
Toughened for life en plein.
“Brute cat, cold crow and sidling kith
All prowl my hedge and fen,
I’ll face them in a scolding huff,
A three-inch bawling wren!”
====================
© March 2019
Monday 1 August 2022
The Comet I and II
The two parts of this poem were each meant to be 96 lines but I muddled the line count of Part II and it came out at 100 lines.
There was a lot of media interest in 2014 when NASA succeeded in putting a lander on the snappily-named comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The pictures the lander sent back before ‘dying’ struck me as extraordinary in showing that the physical forces at work on its landscape were precisely the same as those on earth. This led me to think and ‘The Comet’ was the result.
The poem is in blank verse, the first four lines of each part rhyme ABAB and this is repeated at the end of the part; alternate lines rhyme thereafter.
The psalm quotes at the beginning of each part are from Ps 18 v 1 and 7 (Douay-Rheims); Rough Tor (Part I lines 42 and 48) is pronounced “Rowtor”; Fred West (Part II line 27) was a particularly disgusting serial murderer.
-----------------
The Comet I
The heavens show forth the glory of God,
And the firmament declareth the work of His hands.
The Philae lander bounced from rock to clod
And grounded in a rough-toothed cleft with sands;
Crippled, it still caught images and fed
Them to the probe Rosetta standing off
The comet Sixty-Seven P which sped
In orbit, Sun to Jupiter, a sole
And frozen journeyer these millioned years.
Rosetta pulsed those images to earth,
And all at Probe Control high-fived with cheers;
At last, fire-breathing man, at great remove,
Had placed a foot on débris, solipsist
But earthlike, petrel of the solar winds.
And those tough handlers like the psalmodist
Could only sing then silence into awe
As Philae’s camera scanned the comet’s tracts,
Those cliffs, those screes, those boulder-squatted shelves,
All monochrome, though sunlit – bodied facts,
Bereft of growth, but otherwise like home!
Indeed, not luscious like the raw moraines
Of Alp or Himalaya, ever pocked
With grass or thrill-green moss – their small domains
Cowered from riotous winds or grasping ice;
Rather, the badlands, hinterlands, where eye
Might trek the strict horizons, dust to tufa
And void of plant, and feel inscapably
En-homed, despite all lack, for always present
Is natural form – those landscape starks and slopes,
The mouldings by excision and deposit,
Which, ur-familiar, become as tropes,
Beknown by instinct, us, and us of them.
Think, then, of Sixty-Seven P Churyúmov-
Gerásiménko: its drifts of dust and rubble
Clinched hard by ice, cracking to trench and cove,
Much cliffed and ledged, fractured in plates and shards;
Rotation, solar winds, bestitching patterns
Which whiplashed yards each comet day through slag,
And scattered boulder-drifts like drunken slatterns;
Those flats and inclines, caves and rugged ground,
Acquainted forms made spick in negative,
As if one stood on Bodmin’s Rough Tor, caught
In twilight on a pure-skyed day, alive
To every contour of its rock-thrown flank:
All, all, evince a sort of trustingness
So that what’s seen enlivens human ease.
And that must be: the forces, great or less,
Which fissured Rough Tor and Sixty-Seven P
Are one and same – expansion and compaction,
Full-flowed or torqued – on Bodmin, on the comet
Or any space-time point that’s under traction.
Their consequence in structure, mass and shape,
Be it in granules or the spin-flung whorl
Of deep-space galaxies, is intimate
To us, although their violence might appal.
And inheld by those forms which replicate
The switchback plein and clutter of the earth
We’d grow at one with all their one-toned strangeness.
And the firmament declareth the work of His hands.
The Philae lander bounced from rock to clod
And grounded in a rough-toothed cleft with sands;
Crippled, it still caught images and fed
Them to the probe Rosetta standing off
The comet Sixty-Seven P which sped
In orbit, Sun to Jupiter, a sole
And frozen journeyer these millioned years.
Rosetta pulsed those images to earth,
And all at Probe Control high-fived with cheers;
At last, fire-breathing man, at great remove,
Had placed a foot on débris, solipsist
But earthlike, petrel of the solar winds.
And those tough handlers like the psalmodist
Could only sing then silence into awe
As Philae’s camera scanned the comet’s tracts,
Those cliffs, those screes, those boulder-squatted shelves,
All monochrome, though sunlit – bodied facts,
Bereft of growth, but otherwise like home!
Indeed, not luscious like the raw moraines
Of Alp or Himalaya, ever pocked
With grass or thrill-green moss – their small domains
Cowered from riotous winds or grasping ice;
Rather, the badlands, hinterlands, where eye
Might trek the strict horizons, dust to tufa
And void of plant, and feel inscapably
En-homed, despite all lack, for always present
Is natural form – those landscape starks and slopes,
The mouldings by excision and deposit,
Which, ur-familiar, become as tropes,
Beknown by instinct, us, and us of them.
Think, then, of Sixty-Seven P Churyúmov-
Gerásiménko: its drifts of dust and rubble
Clinched hard by ice, cracking to trench and cove,
Much cliffed and ledged, fractured in plates and shards;
Rotation, solar winds, bestitching patterns
Which whiplashed yards each comet day through slag,
And scattered boulder-drifts like drunken slatterns;
Those flats and inclines, caves and rugged ground,
Acquainted forms made spick in negative,
As if one stood on Bodmin’s Rough Tor, caught
In twilight on a pure-skyed day, alive
To every contour of its rock-thrown flank:
All, all, evince a sort of trustingness
So that what’s seen enlivens human ease.
And that must be: the forces, great or less,
Which fissured Rough Tor and Sixty-Seven P
Are one and same – expansion and compaction,
Full-flowed or torqued – on Bodmin, on the comet
Or any space-time point that’s under traction.
Their consequence in structure, mass and shape,
Be it in granules or the spin-flung whorl
Of deep-space galaxies, is intimate
To us, although their violence might appal.
And inheld by those forms which replicate
The switchback plein and clutter of the earth
We’d grow at one with all their one-toned strangeness.
Friday 1 July 2022
Thoughts Whilst Watching
This 43 stanza poem in syllabics is written in my version of Asclepiadean metre, third mode. The syllable count is 12, 12, 7, 8 with no elisions. There are caesuras in the first two lines usually between the 4th and 9th syllables and there is end rhyme, always masculine, in lines three and four. A handful of lines are irregular by an extra syllable.
An early morning broadcast by Michael Symmons Roberts in June 2017 alerted me to the fact that apparently a magpie with a distinctive mark would recognise itself in a mirror and try to scratch the mark off.
Notes: stanza 28 – the Parousia is the Presence of Christ in the Advent and/or the Second Coming; stanza 36 – the Eagle nebula is in the process of creating many new stars; stanza 37 – when I wrote this poem in autumn 2018 the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the Donbass region, which includes Donetsk, appeared to have died down; now in 2022 it is back with a vengeance; Fowey is pronounced by all good Cornish folk as Foy, a single syllable.
-----------------------
How wonderful is what’s real! A magpie stickered
With a coloured spot when shown itself full frontal
In a glass will take alarm
And scratch that talisman or charm;
It’s proof that that hot bundle – feathers, hunger, beak –
Intent on daily getting and soliptical
To a fault, can recognise
Itself – that bulk, those purposed eyes;
Indeed, can birth a concept in its head’s humid
Warmth, not eatable, not tuppable, therefore for
Most creatures irrelevant
Be they slinking or corybant.
Hence, the paupered blue tit, preening on a window’s
Ledge, attacks itself if the sun’s move discovers
A changeling in the cold glass,
Clueless at sight of its own arse.
And yet, alack, self-knowing’s no cognomen for
What’s pacific in that push and pull, called Nature,
Where “me first” and “safety first”
Govern all, from breeding to thirst.
Consider the crow, which also knows itself when
Challenged: crafty as Ulysses it bundles stones
Into an ostrich-neck flute,
Raising the water in that shute
Till it grabs the floating bon (some unstomached sop
To us); but if on hunger-hunt, its gleam eye pins
A starling’s nest beneath eaves,
Or a fledgling grounded in leaves,
Intelligence turns proxy to the fraught killer,
Sizing thrust and angle to seize the unguard eggs,
Trapping the fledgling en-rood,
Flesh-stripping it, living, in blood.
No, nous and slaughter, double-sinewed, prowl the streets
And dales: think of old Tawny, granddad-shaggy, wise,
Dozing on his ash tree perch
Yet scalpel-final in the search
For rats and rabbits who frenzy in his claws’ clutch.
And if owls, what of men? – the sapient, ramrod-tall,
That brain-on-legs bestruts the world’s plains and cleaves seas
Like some Iliad hero seeking gloire and plunder;
Intelligence, grown self-aware,
Farms life and death and will not share.
Settled, his burghs then swell to obesity,
Fatting on meat which stockmen must ceaselessly kill;
Men by men also are slain,
Primordial passions lunge again:
Perhaps the snitch, dagging home in dark alleys his
Oily blade, or the jilted caressing the throat
He once grazed on, night and night,
Now twisting her scarf tighter, tight;
And, always, wars and rumours of wars, bestial tides
Which slaughter in ravin, flinging up ground, thrusting
Down cities till all are crazed –
Like storm waves leaving Chaos dazed.
An early morning broadcast by Michael Symmons Roberts in June 2017 alerted me to the fact that apparently a magpie with a distinctive mark would recognise itself in a mirror and try to scratch the mark off.
Notes: stanza 28 – the Parousia is the Presence of Christ in the Advent and/or the Second Coming; stanza 36 – the Eagle nebula is in the process of creating many new stars; stanza 37 – when I wrote this poem in autumn 2018 the conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the Donbass region, which includes Donetsk, appeared to have died down; now in 2022 it is back with a vengeance; Fowey is pronounced by all good Cornish folk as Foy, a single syllable.
-----------------------
How wonderful is what’s real! A magpie stickered
With a coloured spot when shown itself full frontal
In a glass will take alarm
And scratch that talisman or charm;
It’s proof that that hot bundle – feathers, hunger, beak –
Intent on daily getting and soliptical
To a fault, can recognise
Itself – that bulk, those purposed eyes;
Indeed, can birth a concept in its head’s humid
Warmth, not eatable, not tuppable, therefore for
Most creatures irrelevant
Be they slinking or corybant.
Hence, the paupered blue tit, preening on a window’s
Ledge, attacks itself if the sun’s move discovers
A changeling in the cold glass,
Clueless at sight of its own arse.
And yet, alack, self-knowing’s no cognomen for
What’s pacific in that push and pull, called Nature,
Where “me first” and “safety first”
Govern all, from breeding to thirst.
Consider the crow, which also knows itself when
Challenged: crafty as Ulysses it bundles stones
Into an ostrich-neck flute,
Raising the water in that shute
Till it grabs the floating bon (some unstomached sop
To us); but if on hunger-hunt, its gleam eye pins
A starling’s nest beneath eaves,
Or a fledgling grounded in leaves,
Intelligence turns proxy to the fraught killer,
Sizing thrust and angle to seize the unguard eggs,
Trapping the fledgling en-rood,
Flesh-stripping it, living, in blood.
No, nous and slaughter, double-sinewed, prowl the streets
And dales: think of old Tawny, granddad-shaggy, wise,
Dozing on his ash tree perch
Yet scalpel-final in the search
For rats and rabbits who frenzy in his claws’ clutch.
And if owls, what of men? – the sapient, ramrod-tall,
Knowing in knowing, but odd,
China-shop bulls, part satyr, part god.
Yes, knowing that the stuck carcass, butchered, creates
Belly-rich stew, more toothsome than some dusty nuts
Or beans tilled in a tribe’s slick
Of cleared ground, husbanded by stick.
That steamy broth of protein, loosed by fire and stir,
The gristle further mashed by the tribe’s tough molars,
Force feeds the gluttonous brain,
And soon Abel is killed by Cain.
China-shop bulls, part satyr, part god.
Yes, knowing that the stuck carcass, butchered, creates
Belly-rich stew, more toothsome than some dusty nuts
Or beans tilled in a tribe’s slick
Of cleared ground, husbanded by stick.
That steamy broth of protein, loosed by fire and stir,
The gristle further mashed by the tribe’s tough molars,
Force feeds the gluttonous brain,
And soon Abel is killed by Cain.
That brain-on-legs bestruts the world’s plains and cleaves seas
Like some Iliad hero seeking gloire and plunder;
Intelligence, grown self-aware,
Farms life and death and will not share.
Settled, his burghs then swell to obesity,
Fatting on meat which stockmen must ceaselessly kill;
Men by men also are slain,
Primordial passions lunge again:
Perhaps the snitch, dagging home in dark alleys his
Oily blade, or the jilted caressing the throat
He once grazed on, night and night,
Now twisting her scarf tighter, tight;
And, always, wars and rumours of wars, bestial tides
Which slaughter in ravin, flinging up ground, thrusting
Down cities till all are crazed –
Like storm waves leaving Chaos dazed.
Monday 30 May 2022
Information, Knowledge, Wisdom
Information, line 19: "federated happenstance" i.e. a community with a settled code of belief and value, such as Christianity provided in the West before being overthrown subsequent to the 1960s.
Knowledge, line 22: weather maps - an annoyance of mine. Previously, newspapers et al published weather forecasts complete with isobars etc. Then, to be 'user-friendly' they abandoned the isobars and used silly pictograms of sun and rain etc instead, effectively dumbing down the reader/viewer who could not now analyse the forecast for himself.
Note: There is little new under the sun. Shortly after writing this poem I reread T. S. Eliot's 'Choruses from The Rock', written in 1934, and was surprised to find in the first chorus: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?/ Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" - which rather adumbrates my own poem in reverse.
---------------------
1. Information
What purpose thumb-jerk scrolling as the train
Embattles over points, its office horde
Sweat-weary on their day-end haul to suburbs
Mute under purple skies? The byte-fed skein
Of information, shrilled with panic verbs,
Enwebs the gorging mind, agog but bored:
There’s texting, surfing, tweeting, sampling feeds
Whilst breasting mayhem on pitched tablet games,
Neck-cricked to earphoned hip-hop all the while.
Through flaring windows starlings bate their needs
Flocked in the fields, prodding a dead-seed dung pile
Like fingers stabbing icons; flashed in the flames
Of twilight they lurch like cartoon combatants
Made infant by ungratified desires:
Likewise, their sapped observers blurting by,
By finger-interest provoke their wants
Of leisure, news and sport, which mob the eye,
Led by emoticons to grins or ires.
Where once a federated happenstance
Gave scope and limit to the throb of facts,
Now dressed-down integers 'embrace their space'
Cravingly unfulfilled by scroll and glance.
For these have never sat before the mace,
Distincting grounded truths from claims and acts;
Worlded in information like a fog,
Only a cleft which swords the torqueing mass
Can gift a vision of the land’s outstretch,
Spying a path to homesteads in the smog;
For facts themselves in mindless pitch and fetch
Are lump as Caliban not bright as glass,
Untooled to context which alone yields light.
So, sunk in surfeit, these loafish feeders bloat,
Suborned by data like the unfree free,
And when that train shrieks to the platform’s bight
It groans the slave song of autonomy,
Void data throttling what it should denote.
---------------------
1. Information
What purpose thumb-jerk scrolling as the train
Embattles over points, its office horde
Sweat-weary on their day-end haul to suburbs
Mute under purple skies? The byte-fed skein
Of information, shrilled with panic verbs,
Enwebs the gorging mind, agog but bored:
There’s texting, surfing, tweeting, sampling feeds
Whilst breasting mayhem on pitched tablet games,
Neck-cricked to earphoned hip-hop all the while.
Through flaring windows starlings bate their needs
Flocked in the fields, prodding a dead-seed dung pile
Like fingers stabbing icons; flashed in the flames
Of twilight they lurch like cartoon combatants
Made infant by ungratified desires:
Likewise, their sapped observers blurting by,
By finger-interest provoke their wants
Of leisure, news and sport, which mob the eye,
Led by emoticons to grins or ires.
Where once a federated happenstance
Gave scope and limit to the throb of facts,
Now dressed-down integers 'embrace their space'
Cravingly unfulfilled by scroll and glance.
For these have never sat before the mace,
Distincting grounded truths from claims and acts;
Worlded in information like a fog,
Only a cleft which swords the torqueing mass
Can gift a vision of the land’s outstretch,
Spying a path to homesteads in the smog;
For facts themselves in mindless pitch and fetch
Are lump as Caliban not bright as glass,
Untooled to context which alone yields light.
So, sunk in surfeit, these loafish feeders bloat,
Suborned by data like the unfree free,
And when that train shrieks to the platform’s bight
It groans the slave song of autonomy,
Void data throttling what it should denote.
Tuesday 26 April 2022
Sighting Venus
This is in syllabics with a syllable count of 11, 11, 7, 14, 14, 7, with no elisions. Five lines are irregular by a syllable plus or minus. There is rhyme in lines three and six of each stanza. The form is borrowed from W. H. Auden's "At the Grave of Henry James."
Ishtar Terra is the high mountainous area in the north of Venus (Ishtar is a Babylonian goddess with some not very nice tendencies); Aphrodite Terra is the flatter area south of Venus's equator.
The true Roman Missal - not the milksop post-Vatican II apology - says of St Tarcisius that he was an acolyte who was, in the ages of persecution, "entrusted with the bearing of the Blessed Sacrament to those of the faithful who were imprisoned for the Faith. Set upon by a pagan mob, he gave his life rather than suffer the Sacred Host to be profaned." He was martyred in AD 255 possibly as young as 12.
---------------------
Rising at three in Cumaean darkness for
The old fox’s toe-knocked shamble to the klo:
Ah, such tiresome pensioned grief! –
Did Achilles blooding heads on the death-fumed plain of Troy,
Bare-toothed epitome of the self-willing skirmisher
Shredding his foeman to leaf;
Or Aeneas, jilling off the low-hilled coast,
Sizing up Latium as compost and seed
Of an itinerant’s home,
At last to be matrona of a clamoured sun-stained res,
Wringing group to state and scorning the volupt’s yawn that acts
Become greatness: plangent Rome! –
Did either play host to the body’s vexed ways?
Glancing from my window whilst tribute was made
I saw Venus resplendent,
Its peephole of white light outglowing all things bar the moon,
Able, incroyable, to cast shadow on a sheet on earth
From a hand proffered pendent.
Double-known planet: Lucifer first, in chill
Morning mist, bright polisher of fake promise,
Tempting men with cheerful dawns
Which crash to betrayal in trade or love with brusque handshakes,
A beelzebub self’s-autonomy, delighting and cruel,
Leaving love notes torn up on lawns.
Then Hesperus, white-golden at sun’s demise,
Doyenne of Hera’s orchard where the maidens
Prune with companionate song,
Bonded in collegial tasks which fruit as choice and duty,
Apples, rightly used, which grant what length a domus can hope,
Making pattern of a throng.
Venus is metaphor: should man plant a foot
He’d find breathing was daggers, heat like hell-flames,
Pressure in pitiless tons,
But work would be done in his brow’s melt, ingathering truth,
Pricked by urgings of right, of lust, for through him natural law
Inhabits planets and suns.
Right action cannot be fudged: tall in the north
Ishtar Terra lauds blatancies which buttress
The king with gods’ condign power,
Whilst crouched in the south, Aphrodite Terra hymns the gods’
Amour propre, trouncing good sense; to man, though, it falls
Not to build tombs, but a tower.
In transit, Venus on the sun’s rougey cheek
Portends beauty spot artifice, hale but rotten,
Ungiving like Narcissus;
Think rather of a scooting boy, proud-tasked in the backstreets,
Hugging the Gifts which will do good and require his dropt blood –
Faith-purposed Tarcisius.
But how pointless to brandish the Pentagram
Of Venus, that New Age bromide which swizzles
Egos on beds of laurel;
Sans denial and penance none knows himself, and muddled nous
Of peevish mantras is teeth-edging, like righteous children
At play, itching to quarrel.
No, best to spill wine to Venus Obsequens,
Goddess of gardens, the formal, the market;
Might man’s wit one day embrace
Planet Venus with gardens, unstrifed as first-bloomed Eden?
Truth, he’d amaze if that were curated on earth, without fuss
Of thundering into space.
====================
© June/July 2017
---------------------
Rising at three in Cumaean darkness for
The old fox’s toe-knocked shamble to the klo:
Ah, such tiresome pensioned grief! –
Did Achilles blooding heads on the death-fumed plain of Troy,
Bare-toothed epitome of the self-willing skirmisher
Shredding his foeman to leaf;
Or Aeneas, jilling off the low-hilled coast,
Sizing up Latium as compost and seed
Of an itinerant’s home,
At last to be matrona of a clamoured sun-stained res,
Wringing group to state and scorning the volupt’s yawn that acts
Become greatness: plangent Rome! –
Did either play host to the body’s vexed ways?
Glancing from my window whilst tribute was made
I saw Venus resplendent,
Its peephole of white light outglowing all things bar the moon,
Able, incroyable, to cast shadow on a sheet on earth
From a hand proffered pendent.
Double-known planet: Lucifer first, in chill
Morning mist, bright polisher of fake promise,
Tempting men with cheerful dawns
Which crash to betrayal in trade or love with brusque handshakes,
A beelzebub self’s-autonomy, delighting and cruel,
Leaving love notes torn up on lawns.
Then Hesperus, white-golden at sun’s demise,
Doyenne of Hera’s orchard where the maidens
Prune with companionate song,
Bonded in collegial tasks which fruit as choice and duty,
Apples, rightly used, which grant what length a domus can hope,
Making pattern of a throng.
Venus is metaphor: should man plant a foot
He’d find breathing was daggers, heat like hell-flames,
Pressure in pitiless tons,
But work would be done in his brow’s melt, ingathering truth,
Pricked by urgings of right, of lust, for through him natural law
Inhabits planets and suns.
Right action cannot be fudged: tall in the north
Ishtar Terra lauds blatancies which buttress
The king with gods’ condign power,
Whilst crouched in the south, Aphrodite Terra hymns the gods’
Amour propre, trouncing good sense; to man, though, it falls
Not to build tombs, but a tower.
In transit, Venus on the sun’s rougey cheek
Portends beauty spot artifice, hale but rotten,
Ungiving like Narcissus;
Think rather of a scooting boy, proud-tasked in the backstreets,
Hugging the Gifts which will do good and require his dropt blood –
Faith-purposed Tarcisius.
But how pointless to brandish the Pentagram
Of Venus, that New Age bromide which swizzles
Egos on beds of laurel;
Sans denial and penance none knows himself, and muddled nous
Of peevish mantras is teeth-edging, like righteous children
At play, itching to quarrel.
No, best to spill wine to Venus Obsequens,
Goddess of gardens, the formal, the market;
Might man’s wit one day embrace
Planet Venus with gardens, unstrifed as first-bloomed Eden?
Truth, he’d amaze if that were curated on earth, without fuss
Of thundering into space.
====================
© June/July 2017
Friday 25 March 2022
Cautionary
This records the unfortunate fate of an ex-acquaintance who never got over his wife's desertion.
--------------
“Women grow old and lose their looks,
And who can love them then?”
Just four months wed, he said,
“When looks have shred like torn-up books
You simply vow to love again
And kiss her age-sagged head.”
But twelve months passed, his wife
Refused him for another man
And snatched her love from him;
His flesh like ice, his life
Collapsed; years gone and dry as bran,
Still smit, he knows not if her beauty’s trim
Has rot beneath time’s knife.
====================
© July 2017
"But the Greatest of These is Charity..."
The first two lines are adapted from a previous poem, "Song" posted on 21 July 2021 and linked here.
------------------------
It’s long-lost loves that ache the hardest,
It’s long-time hates that fester most, The one can rust the gold-eared harvest,
The other sear like black-ice frost.
So states might fanfare motives purest
When blows erupt for friendship glossed,
Or long-hugged rancour grown the rudest
Might leap to war and damn the cost.
For moral suasion quite the vilest
Besmirching acts will wink and boast,
And intellect’s much dog-eared digest
Will green-light death from hill to coast.
Ah weep your tears and clutch your dearest,
Men run to lash you to a post,
You’ll writhe with prayers and pleas the loudest
As dogs are primed with red meat tossed.
(1 Corinthians 13:13)
====================
© June 2017
Friday 25 February 2022
Sage and Onion
To clarify, this poem refers to a long-lost daughter, not wife, lover or whatever.
-----------------
This battered packet, dusty now, of sage
And onion stuffing which these twenty years
With other household goods has joined me on
My long-haul journeyings to earn a wage
Between London and Penzance. Old eyes and ears
Now force a halt, a change from verb to noun,
And I and this packet slump in Penzance town.
Long past its freshness date, it stands for she
Whose loss is like an ill-set bone which aches,
Making the body hobble, and those times
Bright and enthusing as the Penwith sea
When all was fair, and love like fresh-baked cakes:
And once, I cooked the Christmas lunch but – crimes! –
Forgot the stuffing, which in this drab box
Has trailed me since, and comforts though it mocks.
Heart’s closeness did not last, love twisted loose,
And like a ziggurat which seemed immense
Was crushed to stones and dust; it thereby taught
Life’s hardest lesson: all’s a torn-knot truce;
Nor love, achievement, health, can prop their fence
When fate’s ill-voiced contemptuous winds make snort
And like a big-sticked boy with a crotchet wish
Stir up the fishpond and send mad the fish.
Such wrenchings of wellbeing, deserved or not,
Nurture thorned thickets of heartache and of loss
Through which men struggle with a blinded hope
Seeking some clearing like a sun-warmed spot
Made sweet by morning and the downy moss
Where, bloodied, they might nurse their runtling hope,
That piecemeal happiness grubbed up like roots
Which this life offers as the sole of fruits.
At rest, there sometimes knocks like wind in leaves
The knowledge that a half-cock world is known
In journeying, though journey’s end is death,
And that dark portal like a tunnel’s eaves
Is arbiter of what was gift or loan,
Fixing the import of your passing breath.
At death, a chastened man though gashed with scars
Knows all – time, consequence, the stones, the stars.
That vision, from the basalt roots of ranges
To spheres where inter-stellar gas clouds weave,
Finds all is poise, proportion, hence is good;
Then soul melds with the source of being’s changes,
That sui generis which must retrieve
Its own, this universe of would and should,
Even the atoms of this travelled box,
That all be all, the shepherd and his flocks.
Come closure, prayer for her who these long years
Has bent to life’s persuasions, being now
A stranger of an unlike tribe and clime,
Must wish her joy, however damped with tears,
And one-flesh fruiting which glows a woman’s brow,
Fulfilled at death, replacing fact for mime –
That ever present present which was limned
In wounded love on Penzance beach, and hymned.
====================
© May/June 2017
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