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The
sycamore – a fair field full of folk –
Stood
calm against a sky like watered yolk;The late November gales of previous days
Had gone their way and left a muslin haze
Which strained the morning-primrose, gin-taut air
And left a dust of damp on skin and hair.
Before men’s hives had throbbed to busy life
I heard a robin shrilling on its fife
And glancing up was gripped by Langland’s tale
Embodied in that tree’s now drab sangrail:
Its leafage, yellowed, browned, and stained like teeth
Had mostly fled to die upon the heath
So that its clutching branches like a whale’s
Dark ribs, grey-grained and wet, strung round with brails
Of cream-splashed lichen, now emerged to sight
And through their clerestory the morning light,
Shut out since spring, shone through and lit the scene
On which a birds’ commedia would begin.
Able again to perch within the tree’s
Great bowl, the birds intensely searched its screes
For slugs or mites, or merely sought to rest
Awhile, winter-shabby and hunger-pressed.
At top among the bare new-fingered growth
The spiv-like starlings jitterbugged, uncouth;
They whistled rudely, barged for dance-floor space –
Pomaded threadbares, glib and sharp of face.
As high but shunning that licentious crowd
A John Bull robin swelled his chest, red-loud;
Buff-coated, breeches starched, he shook his frame
With shouts to glory and contempt of shame.
Beneath, like Dante’s wind-whirled souls, great-tits
Hied through the tree, keening with wind-crazed wits;
Like gem-green sparks they flared and tumbled till,
Edge-gathered, they were fate-flung from the sill.
Beneath again, a stiff Beau Brummell jay
Ruffed its fawn suitings in a foppish way;
Pained by the tits’ unearthly chatterings
It haughtily decamped on blue-jewelled wings.
It left two magpies hunched like scheming waiters
In work-shined black-suit livery and gaiters;
Felicitous, they sidled through the boughs
With bill-stilettos and untruthful brows.
Lowest were pigeons pleased to be ignored
Like meek Salvationists who loathed a crowd;
Greyly unkempt like parcels loosely tied,
Hourly unclaimed, they shelf-sat, satisfied.
And rising, falling, through the tree’s huge crown
As on a ladder from the clouds let down,
A scolding blackbird like a shriek of God
Cried judgement though its yells fell blank on wood.
For
whether dancing now or stiff in pose
Those
birds will liquidate in winter snows,Infection, hunger, frost, the pouncing cat,
Will tumble them to earth and see to that.
The tree’s fair field will strip to frozen bones,
Panhandled by the wind’s aggressive groans,
A fish’s hollow skeleton upon
An ice-infested beach unwarmed by sun,
Or creaking in the night’s thick-crystalled frost,
A plundered church, its upper windows burst.
How can commedia’s economy
Survive the harrowing of that great tree,
How will the birds in motley or in dress
Make good the winnowing of death’s impress?
Unceasing, Jacob’s Ladder ferries souls,
These to Paradise, those to Hades’ coals,
But birds, who have no rational souls, must cease
Ascent at the clouds’ embosoming fleece;
Wing-helpless, death-transfixed, their souls dissolve
To nothing, as all creature souls resolve –
Did they but know it, bliss, the end of pain;
And justice in that each, like drops of rain,
Unique, falls to its proper fate and then
Merges with matter, not to be seen again.
Each tick of time the sycamore’s embossed
Sangrail, with scars of the years’ scourge encrust,
Gathers the splashed redeeming bloods and sweat
Of riven flesh, pledges which pay the debt
Of sin, and like the husbandman who flings
With swing of arm his seeds to harbourings,
Applies their merits to the farthest depth
Of Being’s epiphany, its length and breadth,
So that throughout the Cosmos an exchange
Of mutuality inheres, a hinge
By which the pulsing, mucus’d body mass
Of living things or far-flung fields of gas,
The swirling nebulae aglow in traction,
The quantum particles’ illocal action,
Are each involved in each, regardless of
The light years’ hurtled distances which prove
That thought makes present all that thought’s inferred,
And all has purpose through the self-shown Word,
A sorrow-leavened dignity that’s good,
As this brute gift of being, logos-shod,
Discovers and elaborates itself,
Making from suffering a sort of wealth,
Sustained despite the faint-hearts’ thus-and-such
By the Creator’s fruitful finger touch.
The shriven sycamore will leaf again,
The birds will mate, then nest and egg once more
And rough-plumed fledglings jostle in the straw,
Soon by instinct to slaughter or to rend –
That seizing or yielding which knows no end.
Until then, January’s ice will squeeze
Life to its core, a famished sullen lees,
And February’s lashing winds will purge
The birds with a remorseless frigid scourge;
Mere bones with crusted eyes and seeping feet,
The tree’s bare crown for perch and scant to eat,
Those birds dredge in the bushes to survive,
Driven by gleanings and a will to live,
Like barefoot urchins in the winter streets
Accosting citizens agrease with meats,
Though thrown by Johnson on his night-time walks
Pennies criss-crossing on the flags like corks,
Who challenged why he noticed beggars’ cries,
And knowing how loathly a creature dies,
Trusting that the Almighty’s will be done,
Replied, “Sir, that they might beg on, beg on!”
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©
December 2014