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.
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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.
The nub’s that man, ludic artificer, compos
And capable (therefore of not), consideredly
Kills the innocent, day in,
Year out, unhearing what’s whispered: “sin.”
Thus, he’s guilty, snubbing conscience, therefore fallen –
Ruinous word; not only he: the universe
Which in Eden’s bliss was named
By self-willed jealousy is maimed.
For fouling all, like heartwood’s rot, creeps Lucifer,
Flung in many lumens from Heaven’s wall, obsessed
With rage at Miriam’s “yes,”
Which raised up flesh but made him less.
In serpent’s pride he twisted Eve, who quibbled Adam,
And all that mighty stretch of the quanta’s being,
Pristine from the Workman’s lathe,
Was flashed by sorrow and bad faith;
And what’s called time and space and history is but
The ravelling of that “non serviam” which makes
Men, dupes of the awkward squad,
Dance at the Burning Bush, though shod.
All myth? Might Sancho Panza science, pole and foil
To the positivist hidalgo, rush with gabs
And tart poultices of facts
To sheath the tilts of his brash acts?
But form and method, appraising of joists and struts,
Or probing deftly like midwives intent to judge,
Explicate the “how d’ye do?”
But not the “why?” and not “whereto?”
Science is reason, given in the cosmos’ core,
It’s premise-bound, and tests; beyond that barrier
It has no being; its role
Lives and dies within the golden bowl.
Eating with unclean hands and mercantile, glancing
Thwartwise when a blackspot patron in coded glints
Alludes that with lack of fuss
A minus might be thought a plus,
(Someone crafted Zyklon B, ticking all boxes),
It’s amoral until bitted by right and wrong:
Morality thus tugs all
To recognise that primal fall –
That something’s wrong which should be right. What’s rational
Is key: in breath-held fumblings in a darkened shed
Came the Logos to Its own,
Inoculating flesh and stone.
Within space-time, coherence now defines an End
(Parousia), and what is rational, what is right,
Once bandied like goods unpriced,
Now stabilise in strength in Christ;
(Screaming Satan, crouchback at the margins, rents cheeks,
Spits at his own mirrored rage, that Greek and Hebrew,
By the Logos reconciled,
Find truth and purpose in a Child.)
Come late, come soon, in Second Advent the quanta’s
Countless clottings, whether plus-charged protons or man,
Traversing event’s last brow
Enter a present that’s pure now;
And Justice, arbiter of gates, will ratify
That Eden-hungered urge, shared by matter and mind,
That each find its proper place,
Weighed, sifted, grasped or spurned by Grace.
And death shall have no dominion. Yes, animals
Will kill until the sky at east disintegrates,
But lacking agency they
Are unstained though alert for prey;
Man, though, the ordured, poleaxing good to quit scores,
Gifted Revelation, can quiz adage and writ,
Gleaning that soiled death is port
To being’s “is”, which falsely sought
Is lost, but penance-gained inwhelms the self, ceding
Truth to which words cannot presume. Life is wanting –
For that sky-blaze east to west
Expressing and closing the Quest.
Whether Creation implodes in a white-heat cone
To a physics-orphaned point, or ratchets ad hoc
To heat-death nonentity
Once all souls are judged, none is free
To know, but Genesis and the Master bespeak
The goodness of what exists; hence, pro tem, viewing
The Eagle’s whiplash gas arcs
Forging new stars in a rage of quarks,
Or the spring mosses in Donetsk, bulging to life
In shrill green while mortars plume the earth in shrapnel
Smoke, or the arguing gulls
In Fowey, keyed as to which one pulls
A half-torn sandworm from the tide-bare flats, pure praise
Can be sung at such wonders, but wonder, all said,
Derives perfume and weft from
Beauty, that principle that’s plumb,
And beauty, like the sun’s gilding on dawn sea-ways,
Is truth’s radiance (Augustine knew). But what’s real,
Seen in its thereness by the eye,
Felt at deep in the viscera’s ply,
Is true – its verso lacking valency, therefore
Is beautiful, all soils and jarrings accepted;
And in this nexus man homes,
Building dwellings and filling wombs,
Dependent in his heart’s thrum on what, sufficient,
Announced Itself – maker, visitant, remedist:
What vantage for truths like these
But glass-gleam thankings on the knees?
Waiting quittance, as all things must, man the killer
Justified if he lifts his hand, quelling instinct,
Might harvest the honeyed earth,
Pouring its fruitings on his hearth,
And even nod eirenically, though disabused,
To the crow and magpie, grasping a better hope
Than their sidled lawless brays,
Their glinted-eyed, one-outcomed ways.
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© October – November 2018
