Eclipse
Was it a total eclipse,
or just a partial eclipse,
that sky the likes of which
I will never see again?
I do not want to see,
let alone experience,
the mushroom cloud
that descends from the skies,
then swells up again
to embrace them,
leaving my ashen body,
a bleak, black shadow
on a brick wall.
Meanwhile, back in my kitchen,
in the lull before the storm,
I wait and wonder if my world
and all within it
will be eclipsed.
Click here for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Eclipse
Monarch
I saw a monarch butterfly today.
A slow soul at summer’s end
slipping, fluttering quietly away.
This has become a regular trend:
scanning the obituaries every morning
in search of yet another lost friend.
Sad, this morning, to be mourning
the passing of someone I never knew,
a butterfly, lost, at the day’s dawning.
The news brings few things that are new,
with talk show hosts, all self-engrossed,
going on and on about the privileged few.
Monarchs and butterflies will perish too.
I soon will join them. Just like you.
Listen to Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Monarch
The Water Tower
8
Circles within circles and wheels within wheels,
the restless gears always churning,
we both know how it feels.
Some call it a gift, some call it a calling,
but we who follow the creative way
rarely know the how and why
of who pushes whom with what,
nor when, nor where, yet still we try
to scale that ladder, to reach that sky,
and always will, until we shrivel,
give up the creative ghost, and die.
Even the water tower frowns
when I write ‘die’. Yet death will take us all.
Tombs and tombstones will crumble and fall.
Monuments, their words carved in stone,
will fall sideways, perish, and die,
their words erased by the sandpaper polish
of wind, snow, hailstones, sun, and time.
May Day
Mayday, Mayday, S O S,
this is a plea for help, I guess.
Dit-dit-dit- dat-dat-dat,
the world lies dying
and that’s a fact.
Add another dit-dit-dit
and that’s morse code
for we’re in deep shit.
What can we do
to get out of it?
Very little, as I see it,
if the world can’t be
bothered to see it.
Another half country
of forest gone,
right whales diminishing,
they won’t last long.
Rivers flooding,
forests on fire,
what have we done
to earn Gaia’s ire?
Human beings
long-forgotten,
but profits are up,
maybe that’s what’s rotten.
We’re near rock bottom
I would guess.
Mayday, Mayday, SOS,
We’ll soon be gone
our works forgotten.
No more humans,
the world in a mess:
Mayday, Mayday, SOS.
Comment: Well that’s how I see it some days and this is just one of those mournings. Say it in paint, say it in rhyme. Nobody’s listening most of the time.
Fearful Friday
“I met a traveler from an antique land
who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
tell that its sculptor well those passions read
which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
the lone and level sands stretch far away.”
[Percy Bysshe Shelley]
Comment: Not my poem – I only wish it was – but certainly it expresses some of my sentiments at the current time. What on earth is happening? Who do we think we are? What do we think we’re doing? Where do we think we are going? ‘Vanity of vanities – all is vanity.’
Vis brevis. Ars longa.
Click here for Roger’s reading of Shelley’s poem.
Fearful Friday – Ozymandias – on Acorn
On Being Welsh
On being Welsh in a land ruled by the English
Dydd Dewi Sant Hapus
I am the all-seeing eyes at the tip of Worm’s Head.
I am the teeth of the rocks at Rhossili.
I am the blackness in Pwll Ddu pool
when the sea-swells suck the stranger
in and out, sanding his bones.
Song pulled taut from a dark Welsh lung,
I am the memories of Silure and beast
mingled in a Gower Cave.
Tamer of aurox, hunter of deer,
caretaker of coracle,
fisher of salmon on the Abertawe tide,
I am the weaver of rhinoceros wool.
I am the minority,
persecuted for my faith, for my language,
for my sex, for the coal-dark of my thoughts.
I am the bard whose harp, strung like a bow,
will sing your death with music of arrows
unleashed from the wet Welsh woods.
I am the barb that sticks in your throat
from the dark worded ambush of my song.
Click here for Roger’s reading.
On Being Welsh
Doors
Revised version
Paintings:
doors you can walk through,
windows that open onto visions
of another, more beautiful life.
Deeper than the paint, the thoughts
and words that formed them,
brushed them into life,
an ephemeral life, so brief
that butterflies seem to last longer
and flowers live for all eternity.
Transience and insubstantiality.
Change is all around us,
we are surrounded by change.
But the deepest changes,
the ones that affect us most
are internal, set deep within us,
death’s eggs hatching slowly
since the day we were born.
Life is indeed short, and art endures.
Carved five thousand years ago,
in stone, this magnificent henge,
first Wood-henge, then Stonehenge,
majestic at the dawn of time,
with its sarsen stones, pillars, post-holes,
and labyrinths, circling within circles,
a frail spider-web of sunlit brilliance.
Lost now, the message,
as my own message is lost,
covered by paint, though words
emerge in the strangest places,
allowing us to peer in through windows
as long-lost words and worlds
whirl out through carved and painted
windows and everlasting doors.
Doors
First version
Paintings are doors you can walk through,
windows that open onto visions
of another, sometimes better, life.
Deeper than the paint are the thoughts
and words that formed them,
brushed them into life,
an ephemeral life, so brief
that butterflies last longer
and flowers live for all eternity,
or so it seems.
Transience and insubstantiality.
Change is all around us,
we are surrounded by change.
But the deepest changes,
the ones that affect us most
are internal, set deep within us,
death’s eggs hatching slowly
since the day we were born.
Life is indeed short, and art endures.
Carved five thousand years ago,
in stone, this Towie ball
with its labyrinths and circles.
Lost now, the message,
as my own message is lost,
covered by paint, though words
emerge in the strangest places,
allowing us to peer in through windows
as long lost words and worlds
walk out through carved and painted doors.
Book Burnings
fire
the means of forging
the Omega and Alpha
of those book worlds
that surround us
fire words
encircling us
consuming us
outside and in
book burnings
Alpha and Omega
so many heroes
going up in flames
fire their beginnings
fire their ends
fire
Last Year’s Snow
Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?
Villon.
Meditations on Messiaen
Inner Migrants
4
Last Year’s Snow
Last year’s snow: where did it go? The snow-blower
blew it around while my daughter made snow angels,
but that snow melted, so long ago. We made a snowman.
I remember rolling snowballs around the yard. They grew
so big we could hardly lift them, one large lump onto
another, and then we planted stick-arms, a hat, a nose.
Our dog visited him. Sniffed. Drilled yellow holes into his feet.
Crows sat on his arms, cawed and cawed, totally unafraid,
no scarecrow this, this fake man made entirely of snow.
The crows saw worse in the roadside snowbanks. Dead deer,
snow plowed into the banks and abandoned at roadside,
their bodies waiting for spring sun to resurrect them.
Our annual question: where did the snowman go?
And its sequels: last year’s snow, the birds that nested
in last year’s nests, what happened? Where did they go?
I have searched near and far, but I haven’t found them,
not a trace, not a song, not a feather floating down.
Where did they go?
No hay pajaros en los nidos de antano.
Miguel de Cervantes.
Click on this link for Roger’s reading.
Last Year’s Snow.
Click on this link for Georges Brassens
Ballade de temps du temps jadis
Sharp-shinned Hawk
She surveys her empire
from a tall tree, then steps
into space, plunging her
body’s weight downwards,
diving into fragile air.
A feathered arrow,
she makes contact, feet first,
and pins the unsuspecting robin
to the ground. His shrill shriek
emerges from a beak
that shreds failing life.
The hawk’s claws clench.
Her victim weakens.
His eyes glaze over.
One final spasm,
a last quick twitch,
the robin is gone.
One wing drags, flaps weakly,
borne skywards in the hawk’s
triumphant claws.
rogermoorepoet 