Once more familiar, like a rare
And convoluted tune;
And soon
Will come the Twin
For Ashes, Oats and Trees
To come at last
To their last Resting Place.
An English man here says
That English men are
Liars: Is he reliable?
That is the final, unexpected
Intermitted question that makes this
Still a surprising variation.
If only LIA
Had crept in earlier, we could
Account for it. But no,
Mere wordplay cannot lie.
So let us say goodbye
To ATO and ABC, and
LOA and all
Their variants, and end
Not with a dying Fall, but with
The Final, First and Tonic C,
True ‘Art of Harmony’!
w. 1969
SPEECHLESSNESS
A soldier at Mountbatten’s funeral
To the interviewer from the BBC:
‘I don’t care what the poets will say,
Our fine old mottos’s good enough for me …’
I think he’s right, of course he is.
‘We loved him,’ said the Romsey paper’s editor,
‘But what does a word like love mean nowadays?’
‘Words, words, words’: Impatience or despair?
Mere wornout husks, devalued coinage, ‘strain,
Crack and sometimes break … ’
‘Decay with imprecision.’
‘What can one say?’ asks everyone.
Some withering wreaths: Imperishable memories?
Such is our ever-increasing impotence
In this our more and more blood-reeking world.
Is silence therefore really best?
Even a poet can no longer say.
w. 1979
WHALES AND DOLPHINS
A Poem for the Greenpeace Foundation
We’re told that we must never anthropomorphize
When we are writing about animals, or ‘creatures’
as we’d prefer to say; nor are we now allowed,
of course, to speak of ‘all God’s creatures’ either,
since there are few today who can believe
that He exists and once created them and us.
To write a poem about whales or dolphins, then,
presents a challenge to all those who see
in the great whale the dread Leviathan
which Scripture teaches man should look upon
as the huge proof of the Creator’s mightiness,
the ruler of the deeps, and in the guise
of the White Whale of Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’
a mighty symbol of both Death and Mystery;
or who, as I do, see in the dolphin’s face
the look both of the cherubim and of the unborn child
safe in its mother’s womb, with the angelic, innocent
smile worn by all the creatures of God’s Paradise.
Many the myths about the dolphin. Dauphin means,
or used to, dolphin and also ‘first-born’; and
a boy upon a dolphin’s back is such an old
image, it surely tells us men have always sensed
some sort of kinship that the reason can’t explain
between the amphibious being and our own.
Then there’s the recent question or new myth
about the dolphin’s sort of speech: a mystery
indeed! Poets and thinkers are increasingly
concerned with the great problems language sets.
A poem should avoid abstraction and all forms
of private declaration of belief; yet I must state
that I’m convinced by what is called the Fall of Man.
We’ve been turned out of Paradise; we’ve made the world
into a shambles and a slaughter-house; we’ve lost
the primal Urspräch which may once have been
also an aid in our communion with the beasts
we now exploit and prey upon. Polluted earth,
polluted souls: Now finally, perhaps too late,
we try to care, if not to pray, for some Salvation.
A poet friend of mine1 wrote lately that: ‘We live
no other place.’ And R. Buckminster Fuller wrote
in Nineteen Sixty-three: ‘Stop “calling names”
names that are meaningless; you can’t suppress God
by killing off people which are, physically,
only trans-ceiver mechanisms through which God
is broadcasting.’ And too: ‘The more man becomes man,
the more it will be needful for him to,
and to know how to, worship: thus the Père
Teilhard de Chardin. I do not digress.
If you have faith you may not have it every day
but somehow you believe that we shall not destroy
ourselves and God’s creation; though we can
‘kill off people’ and, be it added, species like
the direly menaced whales and dwindling dolphins.
Now ‘the light of the public darkens everything.’2
But still the animal kingdom and the world of nature can
remind us of our long-lost innocence. All things shall be
made new. Let chaos come. The mortal must first die.
Yet even an atheist poet3 could write: ‘The rose
tells that the aptitude to be regenerated has
no limit’: and, ‘what selectivity there can occur,
only just in time, and succeed in imposing its law
in spite of everything. Man sees this pinion tremble
which in every language is the first great letter of
the word Resurrection.’ Redemption. Paradise Regained.
God’s Kingdom here on earth. Absurd, discarded dreams?
Not only fools can still believe and fight for faith
and meaning: to preserve our innate, obstinate capacity
for love, for wonder at the miracle of life:
to speak out even if the words one’s forced to use
seem worn nearly to death, and say: Yes, we can still
do what we can to preserve not only such rare things
as whales and dolphins, but the eternal Mystery of which
they are both emblem and incarnate form.
1 Kathleen Raine
2 Martin Heidegger
3 André Breton
p. 1980
PRELUDE TO A NEW FIN-DE-SIÈCLE
Incessant urging, curt, peremptory:
Write what you will, in verse, or otherwise,
Intelligible, using simple metaphors.
Address a reader not just hypothetical
But flesh and blood in no need of harangues.
The time has come. We’re on the very brink
Of what? Can any prophet, true or false,
Make himself heard above the mad uproar
Of all the mingling and ambiguous,
Self-righteous or dismayed denunciations,
Warnings and dire predictions that assail us from
All ‘informed sources’, media-debased and bent?
– If this is a poem, where are the images?
– What images suffice? Corpses and carrion,
Ubiquitous bloodshed, bigger, more beastly bombs,
Stockpiled atomic warheads, stanchless wounds,
Ruins and rubble, manic messiahs and mobs.
– But poets make beauty out of ghastliness
– You think I want to? Think truth beautiful?
– ‘A terrible beauty is born …’ – It is indeed.
In youth I did in spite of everything
Believe with Keats and Shelley such things as
That poets can ‘legislate’ and prophesy;
Or like Stravinsky
when he wrote ‘The Rite’
Become transmitting vessels for new sounds
From an inspiring, unknown world within.
I’m over sixty now, my dubious gift has gone,
I can but grope for unexpected similes.
But now as in the ‘Thirties I can once again
Feel passion and frustration and that sense
Of expectation, imminence and pressing need
To express something that just must be said.
Mature awareness knows that poetry
Today demands the essence and the minimum;
That only Silence such as God’s could say the Whole.
One stark vocabulary at least remains.
The litany of lurid headline-names
Merely to mention which can nag the nerves:
Vietnam, Angola, Thailand and Pakistan,
Chile, Cambodia, Iran, Afghanistan,
Derry’s Bogside, Belfast and Crossmaglen;
Up in Strathclyde or down on Porton Down,
On Three Mile Island or in Seveso Italy
Then there are Manson, Pol Pot and Amin,
Too many more to mention, all mass-murderers:–
None of them need an adjective and though we’re sick
Of being sickened by them they will stay engraved
Or branded on even callous consciences.
And yet I yearn to end by trying to evoke
A summer dawn I saw when I was not yet eight,
And having risen early watched for an hour or more
A transcendental transformation of auroral clouds,
Like a prophetic vision granted from on high.
I cannot see much now. The dawn is always new
As nature is, however much we blind ourselves and try
To poison the Earth-Mother. But an ancient text
Tells of what I believe may happen soon today:
The raven disappears as night draws to its close,
Then as the day approaches the bird flies without wings;
It vomits forth the rainbow and its body becomes red,
And on its back a condensation of pure water forms.
For that which is above is still as that which is below
For the perfecting of the One Thing, which is now
As it shall ever be, World without End, D. V.
w. 1980, p. 1980
VARIATIONS ON A PHRASE
‘le lièvre fit sa prière à l’arc-en-ciel à travers la toile de l’araignée …’
RIMBAUD
The hare sent up his prayer to the rainbow
Through the spider’s fine-spun filmy web,
Despite the huntsmen tracking it below.
The hunters set their snares, the Norns weave threads;
Hephaestus’ net awaits all peccant pairs.
A filament of light through heaven spreads.
A shaft of sunshine transpierces the dust
That rises as the shell’s target explodes,
And glorifies it. Deep in mud we must
Unseal our eyes through choking smoke to see
How slaughter and compassion can combine
To trace a liberating filigree.
A hostage prisoned in a stinking cell
For just an instant saw a glinting fly
Above him as a sign from heaven not hell.
In chthonic labyrinth where we now stray
Do Thou in us make peace, O lightbringer.
Submerged in darkness glows the serene day.
While raw-scabbed refugees without end file
Past numbed spectators, an aeon elsewhere
Some insane sanity sustains its smile.
Yet jackals howl across the wastes of thyme.
The drunken boat speeds on. The skilled music
Still needed by desire runs out of time.
The Charleville boy ended up peddling guns
In Ethiopia, amnesic of dream.
We can end roasted by our man-made suns.
p. 1982
RARE OCCASIONAL POEM
May 13th 1982
The ‘Thought for Today’ that was broadcast this morning
Told us that Crisis means Judgement. But who is the Judge?
You may or you may not believe that one exists.
Judgement can signify verdict, decision or
Fate, among other things. Yesterday, Fatima:
Priest tried to stab Pope. There was one more announcement
That a new Incarnation of Christ will appear
On TV before June has ended; by which time
Perhaps the dense fog which just now envelops us
May have somewhat dispersed, thus revealing at least
Whether fervour for fatherland, freedom or force
Have prevailed in the South Atlantic … or foresight.
p. 1982
DODECATRIBUTE TO MIRON GRINDEA AT 75
Many years, many memories, my dear Miron …
I met you early, an ignescent incomer,
Raw yet ready to recognize your rare repute
Of openness to all original output.
Now none can ignore your initiative nous.
Great is our gratitude for your genial gift:
Rampart of rance amidst Ragnarok’s rioting,
Indispensable international index,
Nonesuch never needless of normative notions,
Doyen of discerningly diglot dossiers,
Exemplarily edited for an era –
adam, acme of annals of authentic art.
p. 1983
ARBRES, BÊTES, COURANTS D’EAU: IMPROVISATION
pour Salah Stétié
« With the situation as it is in
Beirut at present, anywhere is home. »
BBC TV News commentator: 6.XII.83
Dans ma première enfance en pèlerinage
avec ma mère vers le littoral prochain
certain midi nous nous assîmes
sous l’ombre d’un gros pin quand soudain,
étonnement inoubliable, notre siège gréseux
se révéla fourmilière remuante rouge au soleil.
Garçonnet je chantais sous la flèche
la plus haute de mon pays
qu’entoure un vaste tapis d’herbe
de pâquerettes et de thym parsemé
duquel un cèdre se dresse
bibliquement vénérable.
En vacances j’adorais
surtout le riverain sableux
d’un ruisselet roulant ignoré
derrière notre logis: et grimper
en chaman apprenti le jeune peuplier
montant droit comme l’index
auprès de mon antre buissonnier
tandis qu’à l’alentour
s’étalait une prairie soucieuse d’eau
hantée par mes amis mystérieux
le héron et le martin-pêcheur:
un cygne passait parfois par là.
Dans la contrée de lacs des poètes
longtemps plus tard j’ai entrevu
par hasard un cheval blanc bien vieux
sur la verdeur d’un versant néanmoins gambadant,
pégase nordique perpétuel partenaire
que je n’oublie jamais.
Dans l’ìle où j’habite
que le fleuve Medina en raccourci pénètre
un jour j’apercevais, blanchâtre grisaille,
une truie que je n’oublierai jamais
dans la boue de son enclos ruminant son deuil:
Niobé stoïquement endurante.
Mon compagnon c’est à présent ce Medina
comme l’était jadis le ruisselet secret
tributaire d’un Avon; et autrefois la Tamise
a porté mon reflet rêveur, comme la Seine
emportait les jours de ma jeunesse sous ses ponts,
tandis qu’estivant je me trempais dans l’Arc.
Mirage là-bas, obs
édante actualité:
fresque foudroyée, façades grêlées de mitraille,
dans les moellons le marasme des massacres
que dominent des orbites de crânes bourrées d’affres,
hérissement de barbelés et de brandons brandis:
dans l’arrière-pays cependant toujours les monts de cèdres.
Reste à jamais l’oasis par le mirage caché
où coule la source qui seule peut adoucir
le venin de la nostalgie innée, abreuvante
et le cheval et la truie ainsi que toute bête.
reverdissante toujours peuplier, pin et cèdre:
oasis outre-lieu de tous nos lieux terrestres.
« La jeunesse se plaint de la vie; la mort la guérit.
La terre est ma chambre à coucher, la vôtre aussi;
personne jusqu’à présent n’a quitté sa dernière demeure.»*
Quoique l’on chasse jeunes familles et vieilles
chaque jour harcelées de leurs logis,
une terre paisible nous attend tous.
p. 1984
HAGUE HAIKU (for [Salah] Stétié)
In the garden of Salah
The silence is soothed
By the whispered lisp of leaves.
w. 1984, p. 1995
* Abu Al-Ala Al-Ma’arri (903-1057)
THALASSA: THE UNSPEAKABLE SEA
For Mimmo Morina
Sitting on a beach facing the foaming collapse of the waves of a vast expanse of acrid water stretching away as far as the distant line that indicates the curvature of the globe
Sitting in a deckchair with ballpoint and notepad facing the theme of Thalassa
Vociferations uninterrupted since the first emergence of all animal life. Thunders – murmurs: furies – calms. Ultimate challenge to language. Total proscription of words
Primal matrix: insatiable grave. Unalterably other. Unlikeness extending out of sight
We are a minority inhabiting an environment unaware of having given us birth
Swimming, sailing and fishing: ephemeral superfluities
How long before the final drowning of that book wherein it is written that our finest order is no more than a heap of garbage dumped at random on the verge of the purest and most polluted of waters, undrinkable and deadly to all but the Kraken and its countless amphibious hordes?
Triumphant rise, fall and crash of a last billow against the definitive deserted shore: all too human imagining that no incarnate consciousness can ever realize.
p. 1985
ENTRANCE TO A LANE