Friday, March 30, 2012

themes doodle

Trying goldfish

Saturday afternoon
the summer sun unchanging
catches the golden fish
turning under the lilly pads

I remember bringing them home, hurrying

Two startled, frantic with life
in their shallow gasp of water
my neophyte hand
my clapping eyes

open, look, close
opening     closing

I realise: we are to breathe all of life in
And in this, all life is with me




Thursday, March 29, 2012

The Trejamilla

Draw me a trejamilla
What’s a trejamilla
Up dare, she says, pointing
with her crayon smudged digitule
Trejamilla, dere, no, d’ere

And still I could not make it out from
all the books on the shelves





Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Imago Ignota

Before you were born
I was blind to the World’s secret power
to the hidden purpose of our desire

Before you were born
you were already part of the World
revealing yourself through your mother’s womb

When you were born
with your darkling eyes, for the first time
and with all the World, you looked
to ask of us our entire life



Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Clutter












 

…slips in underneath the door
as the sun goes down



Monday, March 26, 2012

this child we have lost


this child we have lost this child we
have lost this child we have lost this
child we have lost this child we have
lost this child we have lost this child

I have opened a window this evening so
that I might hear the rain’s first heavy
drops, there’s sweet scent of jasmine on
clement breeze––Oh gracious world



Saturday, March 24, 2012

Pilgrim

Back up the street he makes his way
through broken pavements and rucked up clay
Past battered drums, banded red and white,
tied with ribbons like the tails of a kite

He comes to the apocalypse and its yellow machines
abandoned by the gods and by men clutching to their dreams
Then, in amidst of quiet despair,
the sun breaks through and nails him there

It is an ancient place, once made
smooth by a brook of trembling hands



Friday, March 23, 2012

Old Poems III

There and back
Tired and alone on a mysterious machine. Entering dissonance’s quarry at Manzini. Petrol and a robbed tomb at Bigbend. Then the many hills of the Zulu, each its own apprehension—the bike fails slowly. Durbs sinks into the haze, old friends and remorse; a distant father emerges. On the way back I meet my dead self several times.




Old Poems I

A week-end like dust

like dust collecting under the stove
and in the corners of this room,
on a chair, on the books and a window sill 

the air is laden with it,
with dry, weightless words
(that drift around and around),
with the besotted cries of the alleys below,
the tap tapping hum of air-conditioner vents
and the ceaseless run of cars

it lies thick on the city’s pale face
and still it covers all with despair—
like a jacket hung over a chair



Old Poems II

In Luther's chair


He finds himself in a room in a chair
Between his fingers is a cigarette
poised over a jar lid on the armrest

He is exhausted, tumescent
with the cigarette’s bruising rush
He cannot remember how he got here
His history and that aching need to be something –
all is in anxious remission

Outside,
beyond the terylene strung across the window,
is another world, soaked and darkening

Glimmering streams mark out the roads by which
the myriads make their obdurate ways home

And the city, its tower lit in the clouds,
becomes a palace of light
nestled in an enormous bowl of stars

The wind, harbouring winter, coldly rolls dark cloud
reflecting at its base, the city’s fevered blush

In the pale lit street, sodden leaves paste the gutters
beneath the ancient birch, their boughs
are full of mynas and their tuneless chatter

There’s a foul taste in his mouth
He wets rough lips and takes the last dry pull in the dark
Its smoke singes and there’s a sudden urge to take a piss


LitNet: 12 July 2006

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Bookmark

As a bookmark I find my words

          mycrimson heart seals like Tupperware
seals memmories of y o u   a w  a   y

For these memories are like food.
It is almost  
   And the famine is almost   here

I feel you going
with every parting
--at the end of each kiss

We both grant, these fragments
may still be thawed and made fair again




Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Come see the beautiful outside

She asks for a particular album “the one with the boys singing”
I know which one but play stupid so that
                it’s a surprise: ”yes that’s the one I mean, that’s the one I wanted”

I turn it up–my son has never heard the sound so loud
he is not sure whether to be afraid or …
I can see that he is very tired

My daughter sings along in Kiara meows (not Narla–the grumpy one).
He cannot understand, decides it is crying
I lift up my son; his warmth is my own soul’s–the kitchen is spread out
                with his busy-ness.

Now it’s time for bed
We do the children train to her ramshackle room

“Come let’s look outside, come see the beautiful outside”

Then, a fulguration of the whole garden,
it was brilliant day, the end of days
and the start of others
                here comes the thunder




Monday, March 19, 2012

In the Fifth Week of Easter

Attrition of the soul
these first cold winter days
see how the leaves fall
like ash to the ground

In blanched light
we go to Mass
the four of us paired by hands
And come back cheerful;
to doughnuts and coffee
to newspapers and home
the children and their parents

Finding our irrefutable selves
in this clumsy way




Sunday, March 18, 2012

It’s so funny

Fire, fire
Come this way. Outside! Outside!
A man’s glasses
Dada–Come!
A man
So heavy, heea-veey
It’s so funny
Now I hear the angle-grinder bite into the tiles outside



Saturday, March 17, 2012

Compassion

Everything is changing. It arises and passes away
                                                – THE DHAMMAPADA

 Where has my endless sorrow gone?

I see it shared by all around, no longer mine
to bear alone



Thursday, March 15, 2012

FOR WHAT REMAINS IN OUR HEART
AND IS FOR US TO DO


From the kingdom of the brilliant banked cloud
A child’s pale face drifts high into the summer blue
And gently evapourates

Then in my dream, out of the window
I see men working in the street below
Bending down lifting up and bending down again


Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Thirty years

Thirty years of war
prisoner to an aesculapian eye
whom excised all that I held in my heart
laid silence on my prayer-tongue

Each starless night, bare-foot
across hills of mordant slag
I searched for that arcane path to the moon
that I too might see
above an airless wasteland
rising against the black

the far-flung Earth again


Tuesday, March 13, 2012

As a child

As a child I found
from every question unfurled five more
thick with pitiless thorns

And climbing high in the leafless tree
I looked out across the burnt fields
all around was appearance, collapsing, dissipating


Monday, March 12, 2012

Being 40-something

When I was a dream-fatted child
the future was grand, wonderful and wild 

With a big plasma gun, my own FTL jet
and a pocket computer that couldn’t forget 
I'd wrestle the fates and travel the skies
not scared of mom and her tricky lies

Yet, all these things I have collected
in the bowl of my forty-odd years
must now be left to evaporate

“it is the emptiness within that makes it useful”
                                                so says the Toa Te Ching


Sunday, March 11, 2012

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. ... A knowledge of something we cannot penetrate, our preceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds--it is this knowledge and this emotion that constiutes true religiosity; and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man."--Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies.

If Richard Dawkin and the same, can not appreciate the Mystery that is at the heart of the religious experience, is he not also by his own philosophy barred from appreciating the mysterious "which stands at the cradle of true art and true science"? Perhaps in this sense he does not get science either.

The Fire of Nachiketa

May we light the fire of Nachiketa
That burns out the ego and enables us
To pass from fearful fragmentation
To fearless fullness in the changeless whole
                                Katha Upanishad 3, 1-2

Her obeisance is to a woundedness and its despair
she knows how to make it grow
and how to grip it with her fist

Let me embrace this imperfectable life
forgetful of her
free of vindication

May I seek what is sovereign instead
Keeper of my destiny


Saturday, March 10, 2012

Wings

Over a glass of wine
we watch the intercontinentals
thread their beams
back and forth through herculean clouds

Against the pale silver of the evening sky
a heron with pendulum sweeps and folded neck
heads home into the east

About us flying-ants shiver
ditch their wings and scuttle across the table


The Potter's Field

Forgetting everything
being poor,  being weak,  afflicted with unknowing


Esurient wraiths trail their weeping
through this riven place:
a vast landfill of mind-stuff…and yet
in stillness
we find courage and patience
to be


bright green on black bough

warm, fretful
before first honeyed rain

when I open my eyes

everything is made new
with one great sound

Rainstorm

If one cannot count the rain drops
in a storm
should a single thought
consume me

What is decided in secret…

Between things as they are and me
sits a palace in the clouds




Our Garden

Let the grass go and the weeds will stand out

Weeding the lawn you learn
that every weed has its own intensity 

And demands you be ready
to grasp it by the root