Time's Arrow

Time’s arrow deathward delves,
None are left behind on shelves,
Beetles, curlew, bare-faced man,
Cannot stop what birth began –

Pairing, getting, toil at nest,
Shrugging spawn to east and west,
Loss of poise, then dulling eyes:
Something strikes and snaps your cries.

First, though, man with “ought” and “is”
Limps the world whose faults are his,
Beauty goads him, stings the good,
Raged, he slaughters for his food.

But at last the cosmos ends,
Black holes leach and nothing mends,
Heat death starves in deepest dark,
Silence touch-walks through the ark.

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© March 2017

Thwarted Love

I said to my soul be still, be still,
If God doesn’t want you, the devil will;
In love there’s always a kiss or a dart,
And both are frenzied as a broken heart.

And if love decays and scorn obtrudes,
Furious as whirlwinds or vipers’ broods,
There’s few who can bluster a stiff-lipped shrug,
Far less a kind word and a parting hug.

For passions broke loose will shred up the clouds
And rip apart mountains like nail-torn shrouds,
And stamped on, disgraced, in the stone-filled mud
The lover’s pale likeness will blacken like blood.

I said to my soul be still, be still,
If God doesn’t want you, the devil will;
Dragged to the judgement, to curse or to bless,
Your tight-ribbed “no” is the devil’s “yes.”

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© February 2017

In Forest Glades

Well, I will not claim this as one of the world's finest poems (!) but I have a sneaking liking for it.

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In forest glades
Where lichened seats
Commemorate
   Old maids,

And autumn braids
With berry sweets
Hang soon and late
   In shades,

The year’s light fades,
The birds in bleats
Lament their fate
   Like jades,

Each seat degrades
In frosts, in heats,
Like shrouded, strait,
   Old maids.

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© December 2016

Morality

To find one honest truth to say,
   And an honest way to say it,
As if one plunged the Milky Way
   To pluck a new planet,

Is of tasks, even though we pray
   Or sing as does the linnet,
As hard as clutching sea-mad spray
   In the decisive minute.

We are conscience-harried clay
   Though garrotters without merit,
And white coat theories or faith’s hooray
   Cannot empearl that grit.

Yet vicious in the pre-storm grey,
   Sweated in sin’s transit,
A tyrant eyes a child at play
   And longs to hug it.

Such glints of sunlight, gold on hay,
   Bode forth a blood-felt tenet;
Life’s years are blanched by day and day,
   Living, dying, to know it.

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© October 2016

Underneath the Weeping Willow

Underneath the weeping willow
   Lover weep no more,
Only death and tax are certain,
   Love is either/or.

Yesterday’s hot shout of joy,
   Lips to lips engaged,
Will tomorrow shrink to scorn,
   Words become unpaged.

Heart-struck loss but burns the stubble,
   Lifestyle gurus hint,
Fallow land fresh shoots will throw,
   Sun on furrows glint.

Facebook page and LinkedIn profile,
   Speed dates and the like,
Soon make lovers, (or for poets,
   A workshop's "open mic").

Sexting, smutty mobile chats –
   Modern love is crass –
Capture hearts as yesteryear
   Flowers for the lass.

None are modest, none might blush,
   Words entwist like snakes,
Mirrored images we are,
   Then the mirror breaks.

Underneath the weeping willow
   Lover weep no more,
Deep as oceans, pure as air,
   Love is neither/nor.

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© September 2016

For those who prefer more contemporary images I can offer, for the penultimate stanza, the following:

None are modest, none might blush,
   Texted words are snakes,
Flat screen, one-shot stars we are,
   Then the flat screen breaks.

"There is Nothing More Louche..."

Kant and Sophocles speak for themselves. Bernard Häring was a moral theologian who advocated a personalist approach to moral situations which inevitably tended towards subjectivism and relativism (not to my taste, thank you); John Rawles' famous book 'A Theory of Justice' contained his equally famous thought experiment of the 'Veil of Ignorance.'

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There is nothing more louche than the passing of years
   – Ho! for the blood tests, the grudged faecal smears,
Then it’s drooping of flesh and thin rheumy leers,

The hospital beds, care home chairs, and then biers.

All that work-place role play and promotion in tiers
   – Ho! for the politics, the sales meeting jeers;
The marriages, maintenance and children’s hot fears
Collapsing in hatred and screeched primal sneers.

Might Kant in his wig chart a way through these meres?
   – Ho! for imperatives and love for one’s peers;
Or Häring or Rawles with two cautious cheers
Anaesthetize tragedy with a fondling of ears?

Oh, age-spare Sophocles like a mist which clears
   – Ho! for those cold-eyed ones, truth-shaken seers,
Saw grimly that men with their loves and their spears
Are flung from their feet and swept over time’s weirs.

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© August 2016

John Davidson and I

Famously, the poet John Davidson decamped to Penzance in the far west, depressed at his poverty and lack of success. On 23 March 1909 he went into the Star Inn (still there) on Market Jew Street and bought a final whisky and cigar. Then he walked off towards the promenade (the only Victorian prom in Cornwall) and was never seen alive again. Some months later his badly decomposed body was found in Mounts Bay by local fishermen.

   He is often thought of now as the epitome of a bad failed poet but he was no such thing. I was greatly delighted years ago to discover his ballads and lyrics which are the work of a very skilled writer. Perhaps his later epics are more of an acquired taste.

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So, John Davidson, it’s you and I,
   Failing, disabused and ill,
Grey, in tatters like the April sky,
   Rarely joyful, always chill.

Mounts Bay rackets with a full spring tide
   Leaping in the spray-wet air,
Beached, the grey-blanched stones are soaked then dried,
   Fissured by their salt-sharp wear.

Life and love in ballast drove me west,
   Here to wallow like a wreck,
Rather, money’s pinch and critics’ jest
   Forced you to this wind-struck beck:

Wayward tracks like ropes of circumstance
   Bundling travellers to their knees;
Cowed at meaning’s threshold, chance on chance,
   Each was robbed of all self-ease;

Worse for you, possessing self in power,
   Who like Nietzsche, tensed in thought,
Bloomed in corners like a thistle flower
   Starved of that acclaim you sought.

Matter, sole in being, tricked out man,
   Death, you thought, was thus release;
I, in quanta, mind, a theophan,
   Reason found, and not caprice.

Soul-sore, evening dark, you quit the “Star,”
   Whisky-vigoured for the prom,
Full tide set the thrashing waves to war,
   Screaming, they became your tomb.

Months were shriven; your body found horizoned,
   Sunk was given rest; that mesh
Strung of bones and cloth, gone melt and wizened,
   Mocked your creed with stinking flesh.

I, like you, in solitary end
   Longed to quiz the brute-faced waves;
Carnal trust, though bodies age and bend,
   Paused me, whilst the world behaves.

But at last, past death’s breath-frantic sweat,
   Being’s time-shed Present will
Knowledge proffer and its bliss abet,
   Stifling sorrow’s broil to nil.

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© June 2016