Time Passes

I find I covered the same subject in a lyric, "Impromptu," written in February 1980 when I wasn't even old. I posted it on 26 December 2012 and it is linked here. Twelve lyrics on the months of the year, and therefore called "Months: Lyrics," written in 2014/5, were posted on 11 March 2016 and are linked here.

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      An ancient wall,
   And one brick shoddy-red
   (Things decay and fall)
Crumbling palely in the rain’s
   Dissolving caterwaul:
In short years gone it’s dust and dross
At the wall’s foot, crawled on by moss.
   Time passes, so pass I.

   The leggy Shepherd’s Purse
   Gangling by the wall
   (Things decay and fall)
Grows dry, yellows to mulching sticks,
Sortileged by an autumn squall:
Those abandoned bones will lie in frost
By the needy chaffinch grubbed and tossed.
   Time passes, so pass I.

      A neighbour’s dog
      Gone gruff and old
   (Things decay and fall)
Lifts its leg against the wall,
Wheedling a few drops’ rancid scrawl,
Then limps off with a weary bark
Having made its final short-lived mark.
   Time passes, so pass I.

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© August 2021

Hark! The Lark!

This should be read with a certain speed, thus copying the singing manner of the lark. I have been reading the Elizabethans recently and they often contrast the lark with the cuckoo. Hence, opportunistically, here's a link to a poem on a totally different theme and written as long ago as 1980. It's called "The Cuckoo,"  was posted on 1 January 2013 and is linked here 

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A hidden dot in heaven’s misted blue –
That vault that’s depthless,
Arching from one far vista to horizon’s other –
And yet insisting on its presence,
Its song a tress
Of radiation that’s unquenchable
As upland streams, as swittering
From rock to rock in barbling freefall,
Scooting in lightfoot pleasaunce
Vertexly down scree and sprawl,
They seek a hearer open-mouthed impressed
By acrobatics’ twirling similes of song,
The skylark broadcast-sows its one and all:
"Avaunt you pigeon-chested knock-kneed males,
Come hither, yes hither, you ladies all,
Here’s a squire who fills his thong,
Eager to tup all summer long,
That, brood on brood,
My offspring like a Saxon horde
May claim the scrub and crop-rich fields
Of these chalk-boned and lazy-rolling wolds!"
An hour or more he hangs
And sings, the syrup-heat of summer, hued
And dense, lolling like ocean swells;
His wings in dashing flitter
Pump up his shout;
Like bells it pells, mells, wells, quells,
Skittles like shells, invokes like spells,
That none might guess
That ground-returned
He’s but a ball of drying mud,
Leaf-shred flecked and mongrel,
Belly-plump like a swelling downy bud,
His only brag his bristling crest,
Rising, sinking, rising, sinking,
As billiard-eyed he darts here-there,
Glancing, glaring, glancing:
How like the silly human, that crack-brained chest-thump chump,
Lard-bellied, trigger-fused concerned with “face”!
Take air, man, launch,
With weightless grace
Ascend the sun’s rich otherness,
Forgetting ground-stuck truths;
Think only of the lark as pure
Affectless being merged in thrilling blue,
A presence and a fons
Which sheerly gives beyond all mind or weal;
And as that lark which neither knows nor cares
But, winging, sings,

So, too, do you.

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© July/August 2021