Rant, I say, rant and rage away, rage, rage against the death of friendship, and loathing built now on what was once holy oath and undying love. This is a blood sport where even the spectators are spattered with the refined frenzy of friends turned into fiends and foes, and this is a protest, a rant against love that doesn’t last, that doesn’t stand the test of time, against families that break up, against a society that breaks them up, driving wedges and knives between people once bound by the puppet strings of love, against relationships that can no longer continue, against the rattling of dead white bones in empty cupboards where skeletons dance their way into legal daylight and the spectators call for more: more blood, more money, more blood money, and the engagement diamond is a blood diamond now, a tarnished garnet, and where is the Little Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, that spire inspired needle that will stitch their world back together, and stitch you back together when you’ve been shocked out of your own ruby-sweet rose-tinted world and torn into little bits in their oh-so-bitter one, the biters bitten and those bitten biting back in return, a new world this world of snapping turtles, turtles standing on the back of turtles, and turtle after turtle all the way down until this carnival world puts down its dead clown mask and turns turtle in its turn.
Comment: My thanks to Brian Henry for publishing this on Quick Brown Fox.
Sometimes you wake up in the morning and you realize that you can do no more. What is it about family split-ups, the ugliness of a disputed divorce, the glue coming unstuck in an already unstable marriage, a financial settlement that satisfies nobody and impoverishes both sides of a divide?
And how do you bridge that divide when you are friends with father, mother, children and the wounds are so deep that everyone wants out, whatever the costs and whatever it takes? And what is it about the deliberate wounding of each by the others, leaving permanent scars that will never heal over, no matter how hard one tries?
And what is it about lawyers, when too many guests gather around the Thanksgiving turkey and knives are out for everyone to take the choicest cuts leaving nothing but a skeletal carcass, no flesh on the bones, and the guests all hungry and their empty bellies rumbling for more, more, more.
My thanks to Brian Henry for publishing this on Quick Brown Fox.
Septets for the End of Time ~ Why do the people? by Roger Moore
1
Divide and Conquer
They divided us into houses, Spartans and Trojans, and encouraged us to compete with each other, single combat, and then team against team, house against house, eternal, internal civil war.
We divided ourselves into Cavaliers and Roundheads, Monarchists and Parliamentarians, Protestants and Catholics, and we continued those uncivil wars that marred the monarchy, brought down the crown, and executed the Lord’s anointed.
We fought bitterly, tribe against tribe, religion against religion, circumcised against uncircumcised, dorm against dorm, class against class, territorial warfare. We defended our bounds, bonding against all outsiders to guard each chosen ground.
With it came the denigration of the other. Not our class. Scholarship boy. Wrong end of town. Wrong accent. We don’t talk like that here. Speak the Queen’s English, you… and here … we inserted the appropriate word of vilification.
Our wars never ended. We carried them from prep school to junior school, to senior school, sometimes changing sides as we changed schools or houses, always clinging grimly to our best friends, protectors, and those we knew best.
After school, all those prejudices continued to hold us down, haunted us through university, red-brick or inspired spires, Trinity Oxford, Trinity Cambridge, or Trinity Dublin, each gilded with the white sniff of snobbery that gelded us.
Alas, we carried them, piled in our intellectual rucksacks, through university, into grad school, out into the wide world, infinitely small minds based on prejudice and pride, continuing our tribal warfare, unable to understand anything at all, other than us or them, shoulder to shoulder, divide and conquer.
2
Rage, rage …
Sometimes you wake up in the morning and you realize that you can do no more. What is it about family split-ups, the ugliness of a disputed divorce, the glue coming unstuck in an already unstable marriage, a financial settlement that satisfies nobody and impoverishes both sides of a divide?
And how do you bridge that divide when you are friends with father, mother, children and the wounds are so deep that everyone wants out, whatever the costs and whatever it takes? And what is it about the deliberate wounding of each by the others, leaving permanent scars that will never heal over, no matter how hard one tries?
And what is it about lawyers, when too many guests gather around the Thanksgiving turkey and knives are out for everyone to take the choicest cuts leaving nothing but a skeletal carcass, no flesh on the bones, and the guests all hungry and their empty bellies rumbling for more, more, more.
3
Reconciliation
Rant, I say, rant and rage away, rage, rage against the death of friendship, and loathing built now on what was once holy oath and undying love. This is a blood sport where even the spectators are spattered with the refined frenzy of friends turned into fiends and foes, and this is a protest, a rant against love that doesn’t last, that doesn’t stand the test of time, against families that break up, against a society that breaks them up, driving wedges and knives between people once bound by the puppet strings of love, against relationships that can no longer continue, against the rattling of dead white bones in empty cupboards where skeletons dance their way into legal daylight and the spectators call for more: more blood, more money, more blood money, and the engagement diamond is a blood diamond now, a tarnished garnet, and where is the Little Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, that spire inspired needle that will stitch their world back together, and stitch you back together when you’ve been shocked out of your own ruby-sweet rose-tinted world and torn into little bits in their oh-so-bitter one, the biters bitten and those bitten biting back in return, a new world this world of snapping turtles, turtles standing on the back of turtles, and turtle after turtle all the way down until this carnival world puts down its dead clown mask and turns turtle in its turn.
Roger Moore is an award-winning poet and short-story writer. Born in the same town as Dylan Thomas, he emigrated from Wales to Canada in 1966. An award-winning author, CBC short story finalist (1987 and 2010), WFNB Bailey award (poetry, 1989 & 1993), WFNB Richards award (prose, 2020), he has published 5 books of prose and 25 books and chapbooks of poetry.
Over 150 of his poems and short stories have appeared in 30 Canadian magazines and literary reviews, including Arc, Ariel, The Antigonish Review, theFiddlehead, the Nashwaak Review, Poetry Toronto, Poetry Canada Review, the Pottersfield Portfolio and The Wild East. He and his beloved, Clare, live in Island View, New Brunswick, with their cat, Princess Squiffy, but they live on the far side of the hill from the St. John River, with the result that there is not an island in view from their windows in Island View. Visit Roger’s website here.
“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.’
It’s so easy to cast the tiniest pebble into the tranquil pond.
Sit and watch the ripples spreading, flowing outwards, touching unknown shores with a smidgen of warmth, a lapping of love.
Reaching out, from the center to the periphery, not knowing where the outreach is going, but knowing that the effort is never in vain if it helps someone’s suffering, reduces their loneliness, brings light to their lives, and relieves their pain.
Bread cast upon the waters, returned in great store, three, five, seven, ten times more than what you cast.
Your spider-web lines thrown inwards and outwards in a gesture of faith, hope, and a charity chest of tenderness to lighten a burden, to remove the dark from another’s heart.
It’s so easy to select a pebble, but who will throw that first stone?
My usual discipline has deserted me and, as a result, I have deserted my blog, abandoned it, gone absent without leave. It’s not that I am not creating: I am. I am just not posting. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I thought that, for a change, I would post some of my Pocket Paintings / Peintures de Poches. Maybe I will be inspired to write verse about them. Maybe not. We’ll see.
Supplication
I raise my hand to heaven in fervent supplication: you sever it at the wrist.
I spread out my arms in despair: you take out a tape and measure me for a tailor-made, hand-crafted cross.
I step on my bathroom scales only to find that they have become the scales of your justice: I mourn every pound I have put on.
Where can I turn for solace when all around I see nothing but sorrow and tears?
Covid bears us all down. An albatross, it hangs around our necks and when we raise a hand, your knife is there to cut it off.
Who are you? What are you? Where are you when we need you? Why are you there judging us like this?
I look up at the sky. By day, a great cyclopean eye winks and blinks and tells me nothing. I look at the sky at night: a silver moon slides silently by.
Orion stalks away to the west. He leaves me restless, breathless, agape at all this beauty that I dare not reach out and grasp.
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.
Duende “Todo lo que tiene sonidos oscuros tiene duende.” “All that has dark sounds has duende.” Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)
It starts in the soles of your feet, moves up to your stomach, sends butterflies stamping through your guts. Heart trapped by chattering teeth, you stand there, silent, wondering: can I? will I? … what if I can’t? … then a voice breaks the silence, but it’s not your voice.
The Duende holds you in its grip as you hold the room, eyes wide, possessed, taken over like you by earth’s dark powers volcanic within you, spewing forth their lava of living words. The room is alive with soul magic, with this dark, glorious spark that devours the audience, soul and heart. It’s all over. The magic ends.
Abandoned, you stand empty, a hollow shell. The Duende has left you. Your God is dead. Deep your soul’s black starless night. Exhausted, you sink to deepest depths searching for that one last drop at the bottom of the bottle to save your soul and permit you a temporary peace.
I guess the secret is to have infinite trust and to hand yourself over to those higher powers during the performance. Some can do it individually, others need to be part of a team. It works differently for each one of us. But when the lower element surrenders to the soul-fulfilling higher element, miracles happen. And when they are over, we are left bereft. It’s the same, in many ways, with mystical experiences. After we venture into the beyond, Messiaen’s Au-dela, upon our return to our earth-bound existence, we are left stunned and stranded by our former voyage into absolute beauty.
rogermoorepoet 