they also serve..*

  (a sonnet for Anzac Day)

With all the rest you stand and wave,

and from your summer dress your arm

exalts and lifts your brave

heart too, as striding down the palm-

strewn avenue they come to raise

you up.  With fluttered hand you bring

them on;  your fingers writing praise

and lifting voices up to sing.

You raise your arm to wave,

and in its secret hollow:  blue.

Still smooth from your last shave -

and this so very mortal part of you

just in this moment makes things good.  It makes things well,

and makes a lighter journey of the heavy steps from hell.

*from John Milton's sonnet   "On His Blindness"  

three sonnets on a theme

Lost (game, set, and match)

The games we seem to need to play,

with their profusion of costumes and tools,

do not raise us above the beasts, as some might say.

Beasts, when they play at all, abide by their few rules

of engagement, without recourse to the referee.

It’s we folk, in our queerness (as they say up north)

Who resort to the sly dig when no-one can see;

our disregard of fairness calling forth

a matched response from our opposition;

cries of ‘foul!’, and ‘just try that again…’,

inevitable recourse to greater ammunition,

and ignoring the ball, in pursuit of the pain.

Even the language of ‘lose’ and ‘win’

echoes the concepts of ’grace’ and ‘sin‘.

 

Lost (in translation)

All the edifices are erected:  neat,

with their separate garden plots and motley doors.

Terraced houses on suburban street,

and each frank face, each one implores

us look!  And look again - these are my eyes.

And there, disclosed behind the curtain-net,

this one irons and that one plans goodbyes,

these drink their wine, and others frig, or fret.

And in each room a television glows,

and on each screen a disembodied face.

And in each mind suspicion slowly grows

That by our separate-ness we’ve lost all trace -

All trace of individuation

lost.  Lost in the translation.

 

Lost (for words)

I don’t have a poem for her.  Words

like love, bled out in lead-hot shower

long ago.  Limbs severed by swords,

lives scythed down;  red poppies in the flower

of their youth, terminated.

Wounds picked at by clacking crows.

Life and Love and Breath abated,

yet still the cold blood somehow flows.

Oh, but I loved her.

To the depth and breadth that my soul

could reach*.  Lost her

and my self.  Stranded, drown-ded, beached, dead-cold.

We Enemies, hearing voices in the mist,

took aim, gave shot, and…  missed.

*with thanks to W.S.  If one must steal, steal from the rich…

foucault's pendulum

the Huma bird

(may its shadow touch us)
      it is said, once it has
taken to flight
      will not

alight

     until at last it must
fall
     back


              to
        the rocks which bore it.

no perch
no roost
no tuck of
                            head
           beneath
wing


foucault's pendulum
completes no circles
 

it is the earth that moves.

fragments

 

listen, she says:

this is important.

there is no border between the countries

of lost and found.

what gets sandwiched

between two plates of glass

*

he says from now on i’ll only do

the things that could kill me:  not

the things that hurt.

it’s a form of cowardice.

*

a syringe of tongues

driving each hypodermic word

*

it all goes down

like whiskey in a cyclone

the virga in the eye

*

this is a kind of aphasia:

that momentary silent

blinking self-assessment which follows

the soft collisions

of small children