Dust motes dance on a sunbeam
as I scribble down a memory, pot it like a plant:
bedazzled, bedraggled,
dazed by the sun’s gaze
I write romance
Sunlight slants
Where the winds’ forget-me-nots blow
summer days’ sway
into a dreamless sleep
dust motes gleam in the sunbeams
that I keep.
A primal scream seeps into these splintered recollections,
forming sharpened shards,
while meaning schemes
to split the scene —
just as I try
to focus on what appears,
or seems, as time passes me by.
As we move towards the Ides
of March, awake, as if from sleep,
Peep up at the snow moon sky.
If you want to read this sky
look up, be high, as clouds
scurry by, just as they did
in Roman times. Forget
context — be free to see
the full moon of late February
slide across the old Aurora sun.
Words cannot echo mood.
It’s impossible to convey
the tingling numbnesses
of yesterday, today.
The semi-detached gaze,
a tight closing-in upon oneself
foreshadows pent up tears.
The fear that accompanies
almost everything I do
meanders like an ox-bow lake,
and can take years to settle at a flood-tide
to knock us off our feet,
It is then our time gathers
to a slippery greatness,
like the ooze of oil.
Threads of uncompleted hesitations,
tangled decades of revisions,
some passing consolations,
always leave this bloody mess
of sense impressions.
Memories diamonds and rust
nothing more.
time’s chasm opens before my sight,
vertigo returns with the Lapis Lazuli night ,
resurrecting lived poetry
of the Byzantines, Armenians, Assyrians.
Each civilization allotted supreme value to the blue of lapis lazuli.
Lapis lazuli was used in the funeral mask of Tutankhamun (1341–1323 BC).
Blue as blue robins’ eggs fly, ultramarine, a pigment of supreme rarity and value
Dies.
In pursuit of the blue, Moses of Khorene born about A.D. 404,
a proud, educated Armenian: a student, a poet, a linguist and a singer of songs.
educated in Athens,.One of those Armenians with an intense awareness of the value of the blue.
Moses knew the full, subtle liberty of the magnificent blue-art of Konstantinopoulos
Moses worked ln the libraries of Alexandria and Palestine,
He sojourned to Rome, Athens, and back to Byzantium,
Packing so much life into so little time was his habit of mind.
Returning to Armenia about 440 Moses retired into solitude.
Until it happened perchance that the Catholicos Bishop
While travelling, alighted at a certain poor village,
He was entertained by the peasants,
An old ragged man was urged also to say something.
At first he excused himself on the plea that he was a stranger,
But, to the surprise of all present,
He recited an impromptu ode, greeting the Catholicos with pieces of lapis lazuli
Moses disclosed his true identity, as Moses of Khorene,
The man had the bluest of lapis-blue eyes.
At first the Catholicos was incredulous,
But, on a careful examination of the old man’s eyes,
He recognised him as his former fellow-student,
Whereupon he burst into tears and held Moses closely in a long embrace.
It is not the cruelty of children that angers me
But that my hesitation to commit the word to air
And, aye, maybe, to the ear, the heart, was treated as an affliction
By those with the polished shoes and starched aprons;
Sometimes I was not even there when they mocked me but I knew
What they did and ‘never-a-bother-it-was-to-me’.
But it was. I was brought up to be brave but inside I was bruised, battered.
Young only young.
I tried to pity my accusers: so narrow of soul, so clipped of speech, so incapable of reach.
I had my brother Pete, now so-long dead, and my sisters two,
Us poor kids, we mocked the rich kids
Knowing how little they knew.
If an aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick,
This son-of-an-orphan remembers it:
Granddad Jack who’d been a machine gunner
On the Somme in 1916
He didn’t say much: smoked Woodbines, didn’t read books,
Denied every pitying look, every cutting word, every condescending bending of the neck.
The centuries of insincerity that have delineated class relations
In this fucked-up country: John Clare, William Blake and Charlie Dickens
I write it out in a verse
Differently-abled stutterers, terse.
We poets arise from the dirt
From the same class that I feel an unending commitment to
The dispossessed, the prisoners, all the spice-island-rough-traders:
The vast, inglorious shipwreck of life’s esteems.
Shadow behind the sun, the echo of her words,
Meanings stuck in transit, the music of the Byrds,
Brimming lives at stake, my friend, as all hearts ache;
Years pass by like phantoms, passions of the heart
Stalk in silence the silence of her heart, faeries take their part.
Forget what you remember, give and never take.
Lift the veil off the mysteries, see the lady of the lake. Silky torn up lace
Mirrors the wind in play, lighting shades drift night to day.
We need what’s been forgotten, the friendship of the ring,
We plead and beg and borrow, no time laid up in store,
See the half-created stillness at the centre of the roar,
Far beyond the gate, my friend, lies the garden
Of our dreams. Days fly by like dandelion seeds –
An evaporated gold wrapped within our dream:
A ghost written gleam of all that appears, or seems.
Blue as forget-me-not blue
Blue as an Alaskan blueberry
Blue as an English May morn
April egg shell blue.
Endurance is a flower
A bulb in winter’s depth
A rare-repeated wonder:
A sin we must forget.
In this-world-of-my-creation
In this world-of-make-believe:
Cancer, the death of children,
Are fallen autumn leaves.
I see this road before me
A road I walk in vain
A road through Trawden Lancashire.
A road that’s not the same.
All roads lead to heaven
And all roads lead to you
And all these roads are empty
Of your eyes of deepest-blue.
I loved the rainy mornings of my life
And I never thought that friendly mountain passes
Would ferry me away, like this,
But now happy times are seldom
And rain runs away with me.
From holiday beach to tempestuous sea
Thunder clouds gather like swarms of angry bees
I have lost my faith in the indomitable sea.
And I have lost my faith in humanity.
I sing only one song now.
O! The mechanical movement of the sun
Sunshine blooms and nectar spreads
Like a tender, living tree
Shadowing all that’s dappled, fair, free⁹
Like a changeling in the ocean
Like the mermaids in the sea, and unlike me.
scribbled on a memory
or potted like a plant:
I am bedazzled, ragged,
dazed by the sun’s romance
sunlight slants
into summer days’ sleep
dust motes gleam in the sunbeams
I keep
as primal screams seep
into splintered recollections
form into sharpened shards
while meaning schemes
to switch the scene
I try hard
to focus on what appears
or seems.
feel the ripples of fear
don’t hesitate, draw near,
people spend their lives avoiding ‘situations’,
running away from ‘situations’
consequences of such avoidance —
sins of omission –
frozen secrets in rocks of ice
leak out into Trilobites
staring out of the deepest past
it is, of course, possible for
any woman or man
to stop this dance of death
by just being who we are,
every act of being expresses
a nostalgia for the innocence from which we arose
this awareness flows into the everyday life of the mind
leaving those ripples of fear far behind
it is a mistake to believe that the brave
do not feel fear
it takes a great deal of bravery
to stand up to the bullying enemies of life
who want to kill you
whether in our own mind
or in other words
strong beliefs can hold fear at bay
while (wo)men bravely get on
with the important work of the day-to-day
and, anyway, the opposite of bravery
is not cowardice but conformity
scared of being in a minority
of being unpopular, of standing out;
and it is indifference and complacency
that murder the soul
that make people old.
For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962)— from his 1920 collection of fragments, Wandering: Notes and Sketches.
felled 1879
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew —
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.
Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)
InnerUrban 