A Thought in the Sistine Chapel

World-weary Michaelangelo
Harrowed the Sistine Chapel with
Maelstroms of the Christ-Apollo;
His blatancies of the flesh-fork
Angered dewlapped clerics who wrought
Correction, daubing veils of stuff.

Pope Benedict, enswathed in gold,

From the Sistine throne taught depth-dark
Truths, his face alight with a cold
Mosaic clarity. His warted
Cardinals shifted hams and doubted,
Seeking relief in whispered talk.

Be it the Florentine upon

His scaffold or Benedict at
His beads, those who have thought or done
Great things are wrecked in solitude:
So Dante, exiled, ate his food
On other men’s stairs and raged at that.

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© May 2013
 

Months: November

The poems for March, April, May, June, July, August, September and October in this sequence were posted on 24 February 2014, 21 March, 20 April, 24 May, 20 June, 29 July, 29 August and 27 September.
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The year collapses. Creatures hoard and hide;
The sun’s thin gruel does not sustain; All Souls
Is chorused with phlegm and colds, and man’s pride
Flickers in guiltiness like dying coals.

Fireworks! Flare and smoke in the foggy dark,

Crump of mines and crackers like tearing cloth;
A spent hydrangea gapes in the fumes’ murk,
And starved, a fuchsia droops its lifeless mouth.

Windstruck, the sycamore and pollard lime

Disgorge their leaves, blood-brown and pumpkin-yellow;
Crackling in piles or mulched with the streets’ grime
They smother boots and wheels, sticky as tallow.

Stripped tree crowns supplicate like sinners’ hands,

Ignored by the corn-plaster morning moon;
Birch catkins like joss stick ash hang in bands:
The fairground starling fizzes its showman’s croon.

Mornings are bromine-dull. Ablution-steam

From bathrooms plumes the air; rime like sugar
Sprinkles the eaves. Post-noon a drowsy gloom
Blanches the clammy light. At dusk a figure

Homes in a breath-cloud, the frost-melt hardens

And night, plum-black, annihilates the sky:
Rooks before roosting palaver in gardens.
Come dawn and gruff horses loom in the lea,

Herring gulls vortex onto the river bank –

Where death pinpoints the straggler with a snapped shank.

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© November 2012

The Republic of Yeah

The first four stanzas of this poem - curious but you can't have everything in life - appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of The Salisbury Review, a quarterly magazine of conservative thought. It, the magazine, is well worth reading. Its web site is: www.salisburyreview.com

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Under studio lights the statesman smiles
Devoting Sunday morning to the glib
Three carded tricks of power: he smoothes the nap
Of his slacks; without a tie, his posture tells
With an unlovely knack                                                
Of nuanced pally salesmanship; his speech
Is negligent, expressed                                                 
With many “sort ofs,” “likes,” “I means” – a botch
Of sound in which the letter “t” has died.
Did Churchill so present himself when bid                              
To action, Clio’s finger at his breast?                                        
   – Yeah.

Colours and cultures clash in the schoolroom

With shoddy uniform and uncouth hair;
There’s boredom and a vicious background clatter
Of slang and scuffling as the class resume
‘The Winter’s Tale’; what stir
Of grief at Hermione’s plight can there be                                 
When language is brute noise?                                      
For thought and language, complex as the sea,              
Engulf the world and, coarsened, thus degrade             
Their subject animal. Outside the gate                        
Gangs churn, and their syntax is taught with knives.
   – Yeah.

On weekend nights delinquents foul the High Street,

Screaming-mad on Jack Daniels and drugs;                              
Filthiest cursing, smashed bottles and boots
Cause chaos; girls, wide-legged and rolling, retch.               
An offhand age thus gets
Its quittance for what’s truly human is not,                          
Foolishly given sway,                                       
Edenic hand-holding bliss, but wolf-pack                                  
Savagery. And sanctions done away with                                   
Do not produce kibbutz-like healthful growth                
But bloodied streets, where thugs posture till day.
   – Yeah.

Father Gerry in nylon vestments sits                         

On a front pew, condoling with his charges;
His brief chat neither purges nor assuages;
His Taizé altar centres a dead tot’s
Cuddly toy; Miss Barge’s                                                        
Threnodical dancing will follow later.
Outside, a slapping wind                                                          
Throws about the gulls’ riotous chatter.                        
Tragic man, brought to the rockface of death,               
Needs marble obsequies to meet that truth                               
Not buttonholed whimsy which binds no wound.
   – Yeah.

At the town’s edge on an overgrown estate

There’s little sign of the “imago Dei”;
The Tomkins household sleeps; the morning’s grey                   
Young hours are dead since life on benefit
Incited them to lie.                                                                   
God’s right and wrong rolls round with trash of pizza                   
Cartons and trampled cans.                                     
Awake, their hours will wander in a litter                                  
Of rancid clothes and half-pulled curtains. Feeding,
Begetting, fighting – all’s public; their offspring
Prepare their future with a stoat’s whine and claws.                    
   – Yeah.

In David Allan’s “Sir William Erskine

And Family” all is formal. His sons,
Returned from hunting, race to show a fox’s                 
Brush to their mother’s and sisters’ bright approving
Glance. Buskins and frock-coats,                                                         
Huntsmen and horses, hounds, attest a self-                                        
Respect that’s approbated
By God’s rich sky. Erskine, made grave by his rough                
Commander's duties in the wars, looks on:
Each one has dignity of state, a decorum                                                     
Undone when demos, the serpent, mutated.
   – Yes.

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© May 2013 Revised July 2016

Months: October

The poems for March, April, May, June, July, August and September in this sequence were posted on 24 February 2014, 21 March, 20 April, 24 May, 20 June, 29 July and 29 August.

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The spiked limes of chestnut plummet and burst,
Gaping like fledglings’ mouths, disgorging nuts
Glossy as foals. The sunspot dahlia, cursed
By rust, sags, and the mauve aster abuts

The ground. Apples, pears, blush ripe and are gathered;

Plums are downy like cheeks, though whitepox mould              
Rots the fallen. Leafage, jaundiced and weathered
Like skin, dangles dolefully, rueing the cold.

Night darkness deepens and sunrise is damp;

Mist like a low tide sluices the coppice.
Birds are silent; and, bodies in a hump,
Folk rush to work, their faces like pumice.

The angry wasp dies. Unmindful, the sheep

In the fields await slaughter. Autumn’s effacement
Looms, and like children feverish in sleep
Folk fidget, resisting the abatement

Of blood and flesh. Post-equinox, the rains

At last begin – a drenching, drumming fall
From cloud like a taut sheet, engulfing drains,
Stained with the city’s lights like yellow gall.

A gale follows. Mountainous gun-metal cloud

Invests the horizon. Battle-primed wind
Assaults the sopping ash trees, barrels loud
In subways. Later, the assault declined,

Sunlight cracks the siege towers’ plinths and domes,

Searing them gold and white with lacquers, chromes.

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© October 2012

The Anthropological Turn

A fist of lightning sunders the packed cloud
On Sinai’s peak; thunder engulfs the slopes;
Moses, exultant with the Tables, browed
With light, descends to mould men’s fears and hopes:
Moral truth is given and hence endowed
Is beauty – golden cherubim and tropes
Adorn the Ark. A proud propitiating
People is created, lacking but one thing.

The Nazarene, transfixed with the Divine,

On Shabbat day completes the Torah’s lack:
“Stretch forth thy hand” – a flesh-transcending sign                   
Is given, pity more flagrant than God’s back
Seen by Moses in the cloud. Like sweet-scent wine
Compassion infuses dogs-in-a-pack                                         
Humanity, and though men riot like fools                                   
Their wounds are bound by hospitallers and schools.

Later, the harmonic circle is smashed:

Vaunting men, in love with experiment,
Scrub Revelation’s face until it’s washed
Raw. Diderot’s book swells to a testament,
Newton by the sea of knowledge is splashed,
Paine’s pot of rights boils to a sacrament;
Hume demands freedom to die in his sins;
In France the clash of guillotines begins.

The wheel turns. A Sixties scientist re-presents

The fruit; Eve swallows and fecundity
Is balked. Man centres self and the ornaments      
Of being are smashed in a futility
Of drugged desires. Harsh New Age hierophants          
Propose fault-free fulfilment and absurdity                          
Is raised a god. Two thousand years of symbols                                
Are overthrown by dancers beating timbrels.

Destruction triumphs. Pornography swamps

The internet; man’s primal itch inflamed,
Aggression surges and motel room romps                                 
Turn rapes. Enthused, unnatural rights are named –
Gay marriage, gender choice – what tawdry pomps!               
Careerist women have the boardroom tamed;               
Children are objects, abortion’s in demand:
Moloch counts dollars with a blood-stained hand.                     

Saint Damien sweats in Hawaii’s heat,

Dressing ulcers, digging graves. The leper priest,
In the eternal wrapt, with bandaged feet,
Scarred face and dragging legs, dies for the least
Of his charges. There’s no despair, nor bleat
Of woe, instead a pure-eyed grasp of the feast
Of being. Fulfilment’s not in drugs or vice
But in hands gone leprous in sacrifice.

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© April 2013. Revised June 2016

Months: September

The poems for March, April, May, June, July and August in this sequence were posted on 24 February 2014, 21 March, 20 April, 24 May, 20 June and 29 July.

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The hemisphere reclines, skittling the sun
Towards its winter wanness. A dawn bar
Of lemon light descends facades and dun
Windows erupt. Mercury dew on car

And hedge embodies the high flat sky where jet
Tracks stipple the cloth-thin blue. A transhumance
Begins, archaic and grim. Howling regret
The swifts have fled. Coal tits feed in a trance.

By afternoon an Indian warmth has built

And sea winds thresh the tamarisk. Inland,
Butterflies dither between the rattling quilt
Of sweet pea and violet scabious, japanned.

Fruits firm. Blackberries at the line side glow

Off-limits. The dusted bilberry is shy,
The glossy rosehip brash; glimmers the sloe;
The tree fruit though is hard and green, still dry.

Die-back sets in. Hibiscus loses bulk;   

Once more lost pots wink through the whiskery grass;
Moisture is lost – the ligamented hulk
Of bramble quivers its limbs under the brass

Harvest moon. Harvest home! Church bells call out

In short-lived homage, but the golden gleams
Of summer turn matt and autumn’s redoubt
Of plenty is mined by shivering dreams

Of starving villeins gleaning ice-hard tillage:

Against winter, men gather wood and knowledge.

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© September 2012

A Biedermeir Age

Note (19 May 2016): This poem was written in rugged ottava rima which I have come to think of as too rugged. Hence I have revised the poem for greater smoothness, and quietly amended it in situ.

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Bronze statues glowing under London rain
Declare, forlorn, a bankrupt history:
Nelson and Cunningham who held the main,
Napier and Havelock seizing victory,
Are swamped in Nelson’s square beneath the vain
Roarings of Muslim demagoguery.
Disdained is public beauty, Roman, Greek –
The fourth plinth occupied by a crop-haired freak.

Pinioned before a screaming crowd a scold

Is ducked, her tongue strapped by an iron bit;
Of country stock, like seasoned oak, she told
Unnerving truth, shared in the ancient writ
Of peoplehood, now banished behind the fold
Of a hand in taverns. Magistrates sit
In well-soaped watchfulness; their rolled-up laws
Poised to curb honesty like a grim monk’s tawse.                     

Borders create cultures – a steepled range,

A sweeping river or the jagged sea –
All nurture smoky camps which swell to grange,
Then town and city, time-bedecked, whose glory
Is marble, and where golden towers arrange
The twilight sky. But should a foreign bee
Seduce the hive, feud engulfs the honeycomb:
Polis, comity, art come tumbling down.

Art is corralled – a gleaming stallion

Gone broken-winded in a muddy field;                         
Its maker’s brio that of a scullion
Scouring pots: Hockney’s colours all congealed
Like Barbie make up; Hirst enjewelling bullion
For hedge-fund men; and Emin loath to wield
A pencil but Professor nonetheless –
Insubstantial putty, an infant’s cess. 

Sentiment triumphs. On a pastel couch,

A lout in jeans and trainers howls, urged on
By cameras to hug his winnings in a slouch                       
Of gross delight. Such is the snotty guerdon
Of grammar-masters’ age-old work to vouch
For man’s civility and learning’s garden.
Did Scipio act so, when Hannibal fled
The plain of Zama, disgrace upon his head?

The straits are breached, the towns are seized; the marches

Bristle with mute despair: Tariq bin Ziyad,
Kettledrums pounding, stacks the Guildhall’s arches
With spoils of war. His thin-eyed mullahs of Ryadh
Uncrate their close-writ texts, their Law which starches
All it grips. Ambrosius, torn, ill-clad,               
Conspires revolt, but his captains, cold and nerve-shot,
Cravenly slink away to barn and cot.

Low cloud and rain hang upon the town square;

Gottlieb Biedermeir goes home for lunch;
A medieval clock tower rattles the air;                     
Moroccan street toughs, Roma girls, a bunch
Of scuffling Poles, and him, attract the stare
Of batoned police: move on, ignore the crunch
Of glass. Think nothing. Lunch is cheese and fruit;
After, Herr Fless calls with fabrics for a suit.                             

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© April 2013. Revised May 2016