A Sufi Saint contemplates his imminent dissolution

 

Goodbye my Sufi friends and lovers

Nothing now exists to connect you to me

Tayyar is honourable and full of good intent

I will rise from the trap of the world

I will ask you to be my servant in paradise

You are my dancer, I am your poet, we can laugh

Together on days when I taste the rain-drift-clouds.

When you sew I can watch you and fall in love

Again I remember our first meeting

Amongst the sweet smell of the jasmine

In the rose garden where we couldn’t be

Seen or overheard. You were my perfumed

Idol. You are my window on eternity.

When Mansur Al-Hallaj was finally executed

For the blasphemy of being a Sufi I knew

My time would soon come. The Abbasids do not

Forgive. So, on this tight night of bone-white

Light I do not think of my execution. The Day

Of Death will come regardless. They say

Do not buy wine from a foreigner but this wine

From Andalusia is so sweet and clear, it is like a mirror

Or a still lake, we can see ourselves clear and calm.

Unaffected by the ripples which do not draw near.

On this day of rumbling thunder and dark clouds,

Skies swirl and whorl on this day of days.

I am not an unbeliever but I know there are many

Truths. I was accused of paganism for reading the Greek.

Herodotus, the father of History, he did not seek to

Write a Greek version of the Greco-Persian wars

He sought to help us to learn from past conflicts.

For Herodotus attributes the causes of war

To both divine and human agents,

Who he did not perceive as being mutually exclusive,

But rather as being mutually interconnected.

Will this day of rumbling never be done?

Be sure to testify, always, to the spirit of tomorrow

And kiss me at this door of eternity,

Your hand shakes,

Djinns are all around us. Listen to the wind.

We will not be separated long, my love.

 

et in arcadia ego

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I’ve always been interested in what life may have been like in England before the carnage of WW1 and how that most terrible of wars impacted upon people all over these British Isles.  These two poems provide, in their different ways, a tiny glimpse into that lost world of innocence, before the pain began of fractured families and broken hearts.

Adlestrop is based on a railway journey Thomas took on 24 June 1914, during which his train briefly stopped at the Gloucestershire village of Adelstrop.

Thomas enlisted the following year, and was killed in 1917, just before the poem was due to be printed in his collection Poems.

Adlestrop

BY EDWARD THOMAS

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Causley’s family history tells us that his father returned from the First World War as an invalid, and he died in 1924, having never recovered from his injuries sustained in the war and dying of tuberculosis, 

EDEN ROCK

BY CHARLES CAUSLEY

They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
I had not thought that it would be like this.

‘

Messing about in boats

Ah, the tip of the straw still gripped by your teeth

I move you gently. You are asleep.

Not jealous or envious or proud.

You have a little money but enormous dignity.

You live in a caravan and still poach

For the pot. You are remarkably silent about the past.

I think it is wise to let sleeping dogs lie.

You would have taken another birth into more fortunate circumstances

But that was in another country and, besides, the wench is dead.

You make your arrows for your bow,  have a boat made from old furniture.

You love messing about in boats and keeping clear of anybody in a uniform.

Some days I find you just floating around in languorous circles, fast asleep

For you, roaming is for life.

You are keenly aware of shades, when you paint,

Stippled skies of dappled hues.

Not the gloomy colours of uneasiness, sadness and urbanity.

 

Meanderings

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Find a way to tell the truth then realise

The truth  will DEFINITELY pull out your eyes

Once upon an old time  days were put away,

Saved up for days by the sea.

Now, extremity of mood is  the mother of invention

Some say this, some say that, some just cough for attention

Play Solitaire whilst sitting on a stair

Staring into thin air

John O’China sailed outer Liverpool

Garments were varied, men too:

Bullies were thumped first

The wind and the raiin fell

All around the Cape, the crossing from hell.

As I climb this steep Cornish cliff

I see embedded fossils stare

at me, telling me how it used to be

In the Jurassic and who can say

they’re wrong, the past sings a different song,

what’s going to happen next – we don’t wanna know

when the beginning is the end, my friend, trust to snow.

I retrace my steps along the vertiginous

Path. Wobbling, I recall her words and tone

 Don’t come back home alone, just don’t.

Pastoral, and slowly,  simply and solely,

I see the slippery snake slowly slither

Over the steep hillside, dropping into the river,

Like a salt-water crocodile.

Forget-me-not

Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash

When you came to me, through an open window

All the cracked envelopes of me came into your hands,

There was nothing in them — just love that you could throw away –

If you chose, you threw it straight back to me, I caught it, we were away.

You gave me a lot of praise with your eyes

For being alive

I thought you are desiring reciprocation, but you weren’t

You were just a girl, I was just a boy

I felt the difference: of mood, of shape and tone

I was no longer alone. You wrapped me in you,

I went berserk: with happiness.

Could you not see me burning with the heat of you?

A smell that flashed gestures in my eyes,

Like the spelling of your name, little sweet, skewed spelling

Of your name,The straw hat that was stuck on your head

Was a jubilee for me. Today I could fall asleep happy.

I am seventeen next week..

Under the Volcano

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on a road out of London pulled up at a pub

heard him say the words I remember, today.

the drinking man suffers: glug, glug, glug

the drinking man loves: glug, glug, glug

taste of whiskey, craic,  all that convivial shite

he remembers, truly remembers – he’s a creature of the night

searching for the resurrection of a moment of lost content

he rumbles all the lying, of his friend

drinks a drink or two or twenty

hever counts, just say ‘plenty’

aligned with the rhythm of a 12-bar blues:

booze

he’s seen his way to AA, up on the Finchley road,

but had to confess,

he loved too much the sparkle of laying on a load

he dances in his head too much,

jives with the sun,

and after all the music

poetry has begun

 

 

Icelight

Photo by Kirill Pershin on Unsplash

Icelight in my eyes

Iceflowers in the wind

storm black night

stings me awake

dreams scatter

light disperses

(black with cloud,

into verses,

earth, in grave colours)

No black candles here

no witches’ moon,

no lifting of the gloom

gone, gone, all too soon

(see the dead a-glimmering

brimful against the sky).

Alone in a room,

iceflowers zoom

a-shimmer in my head

the living and the dead

(a dark-blue bloom

on the far-away moon)

The heart is never done,

words stumble into line

we are not who we think we are

phoenixes made of time

(flesh blood,

bread, wine).

Still the music of the spheres,

reverberates in an echoing sky.

Invisible moonbeams

drifting quietly by.

( line-up the distant hills

write-up the glowering sky,

let it all go tumbling by).

PLACE OF RECOVERY

 

Gorffwysfa – her place of recovery –

From meeting grief at the flood-tide

This is where she began,
Amharic text in heart and Amharic text in hand,
As we live beneath the sun,
She was a warrior,
An Amazon without a gun.

…….

Sky was black as gold
Dragged across the sunless sea were we
By men without a soul:
Her stories and narrations,
Her lives as yet untold

Lost, deep in the stinking slave ship hold.

From these slave ships and from factories,
Amidst this freezing cold,
She heard the triumph of wizened men:
Men who’ve never see the sun;
No wonders to behold.

Mean men these counters,
These misers of the heart,
Their fractured souls’ inheritance
Is to live their lives apart
From this Abyssinian maid
They hoped was in her grave.

…….

Such long and false forgetting,
Of moons and seas and sunne,
Is lifted by the light of night:
In the heart where songs begun
Of damsels rare and golden
Who sing beneath the sun.

……….

As Coleridge once foretold

This journey has begun. .

There’s no return to normal

And winter is forever,

Her ashes set aside,

wait-in-line, learn to abide wherever

time is of the essence,

but there’s nothing to be done;

every little thing is wasted,

and you’re left without a guide,

let her simple, lovingkindness,

Be your guide.

 

An Essential Melancholy

the may flower is out
and a warm wind
storms along
the coast;
twilight
gathers shadows
into the sea,
the night
swells, heavy
with anticipation;
far away
blows
a whale,
a candle
throws shadows
on these pages
where the light
infantry
march along,
whistling
a cheerful
song,
wink
at the pretty girls,
who shake their ribbons
and their curls,
so fleetingly.

The solitary rose of your breath

Photo by Julie Johnson on Unsplash

Angel light, a slight, feathery goodnight kiss,

behind her eyes a guardian angel sighs.

The whisperer behind the song,

A misfortune in thought is exorcised:

close harmonies, fugues when

nothing’s wrong.

A song in a minor key, a longing to be whole and free

Roll away the stone:

On this seafront there is a stone,

where, in the creamy moonlight of an old raggedy romance,

men and women pledge,

men and women dance,

under the moon

in a place where a single ghost abides…

owls screech their ageless, endless cries

to a high, star-cluttered sky.

It is a place where all your dreams come true,

moonstruck eyes, derring-do,

flee into the glassy sea,

echoing the old, old story,

whisper it soundlessly,

enriched by such and such

wild sprigs of poetry.