After a six month gap in posting due to catching Covid and then an operation followed by old man's lethargy, I return. This poem was written in three stints: Oct - Nov 2016, Dec - Jan 2017 and after a gap occasioned by "life" May 2019. The entire thing was then revised in January 2023. It struck me that returning to the poem in May 2019 I did not manage the same intensity and, perhaps, the thought was cruder. Hence, for no other reason, I have separated out the final part by a section break.
The poem is written in rhyming couplets of alternating alexandrines and pentameters - the old Greek elegiac metre. I have used it previously for more personal poems: "Washington Square Revisited", here, and "A Dream", here. It was also meant to have masculine line endings throughout but feminine endings slipped through, embarrassingly early, in lines 21/22, so, in a weird attempt at symmetry, I allowed one couplet in the second part to have feminine endings - lines 191/192. The poem is 226 lines in length.
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Despite the larch tree’s glitter in the summer sun
The standfast colour of the world is dun,
Yes, even in the tropics where the light is fat
The heavy dust and leathern leaves are matt.
On well-groomed beaches or expensive skiing slopes
Where belles wear little or their beaux’ fur copes,
Unnoticed at the root of all that has a gleam
A shadow tempers, dulling gloss to cream;
For all that glitters in the dancing hard-drilled light
Is metaphor for man’s deflecting rite,
That rubric of insouciant self-accorded praise
Confecting lard-thick flesh and cocksure ways
To sacraments of money, health, good looks and youth,
Matter-impounded and the prime of truth,
So that success, flip happiness and game show fun
Define the essence of a life well won.
Ignored but present like the soot which darks the fire
Death drabs this partying and chokes the lyre;
For merest quizzing of the dawn-cold world which squats
In misted twilight east of Eden’s plots
Bodes forth the grindstones of existence turned by beings
Embodied in their huntings, trappings, fleeings,
The creatures gnawing blood-drenched meat from screaming prey –
Perhaps the haloed lion, keen to slay,
The sneaking fox which tears apart a new-born calf,
Or scooping bear which chews a fish in half;
As well the rock-and-water littoral where towns
Are roasted when volcanoes rent their gowns,
And storms with howling basalt waves a building high
Capsize a ship and drown each deckhand’s cry;
Inland, the deserts parch; a camel’s ribs are stripped
By famishing hyenas, gobbet-lipped;
In cities of the plain a high-speed train derails
And abdomens and skulls are crushed like pails.
O Calvary of creatures! All organic things
Despoil in death; nor that which flies nor clings
Remains, engrounded but ignored by dust and stones;
For inorganic being weeps no moans
However much it shapeshifts for its nature stays
Untouched, and that which never dies nor greys
Can ache no thought for hapless trees or wind-thrown scrub,
For wasps, for sharks, bacterium or grub,
And self-harm man – all suds which daily writhe and die,
Dung to the earth and apple of no eye.
And so the world is dun because it’s death-embraced,
And man the thinking molecule, shock-faced,
Must thread the matrices, the mesh of things in time,
Like Theseus aghast in bloody grime,
Tasting the consequence of carbon’s helter growth,
Body-moulding and dying, blank in both.
Hence, blatantly at sunrise when the light enfoils
The purple hills with gold and steams the moils,
Again at sunset as the coal-thick sea of night
Engulfs all conning sense of width or height,
The measure which gives meaning to these own-lawed states
Is human death, and whether at the gates
In rich-robed judgement or entailed in flint-strewn fields
Man takes from death whatever hope he wields.
His value, consciously and fully lived in will,
Impassibly corralled by death’s blank sill,
Must stretch its legs and fill its lungs in daily view
Of time’s encircling cloudbank with its hue
Of leaden depth, unsearchable and like a noose
Which in its bounding, boding as the deuce,
Creates man’s meaning by obliging him to live
Aware of self’s demise in death’s dank sieve.
