Here in a bed whose frame reverberates
Like a piano as the lightening draws
Blinds down the window, dazzling in its force,
Dying (when every good man meditates
On sin, repenting as life dissipates),
I regret nothing. I uphold the cause
Of my own genius. It makes its own laws,
Defying still all it exasperates.

Roll out your thunders, storm clouds. I am deaf.
How long since I last heard my symphonies?
They burst like lightening from a living death
And filled the world with deathless harmonies.

In one last act of rage, I shake my fist
At all that noise that drowns a soloist.

.

---

I don’t know how  factual is the historic account of B’s defiant death during a thunderstorm. I do know it makes great drama. He turned himself into metaphor of the human spirit, the restless quest for something better, the frequent surrender to something worse. Rest in peace, Beethoven. The picture hardly seems appropriate but it is all I could find.

Current edit:

26 August (have I been busy today!)

The prey of any larger thing
That flies or swims or walks,
I run sideways in armour plates,
My eyes lookouts on stalks.

Huge and malformed, my fists express
My contempt for the land.
It offers me no refuge but
These barren rocks and sand.

Huge and malformed, my fists express
My hatred of the the sky.
What earthly use is all that space
To those who cannot fly?

Huge and malformed, my fists express
My disgust at the sea.
How can I love a think like that
That made a thing like me?

Yet who is better formed than I
For grabbing and for holding
Small morsels drifting round the seething
Edge of a devil’s cauldren?

---

To know all is to forgive all.

Once everything is tried,
All we set out to do,
Nothing ommitted on our side
That courage is committed to,
Once men from every township have bent
Themselves into the throat of hell, when all
The smiles and cheers exploding as we went
From home seem pieces of a broken shell,

When all we are is here,
Flesh propping rags in mud,
Bones hollowed with remembered fear,
The passing scream, the distant thud,
The order in the dark, ranks moving up
Under the battlements of sighing earth
Before once more we swarm over the top,
War’s children at the moment of their birth,

Its horror hurrying forth
Amid the flare and wild
Report of guns, its east, west, north
And south all at once in one spot piled
And suddenly all torn apart, what was
A man now just a tumbling coil of wire,
A meadow flower at last wrapped up in grass
The farmer mows and carries to the byre

Before fetching his coat,
Returning to his wife
And children gathered in the home:
If something of us remains alive
At that time and our eyes collect like stars
Against his window pane, bright with desire,
Will we remember then the sacred cause
Our fathers read in columns by the fire?

 

---

 

In my country, the main national day commemorates a military catastrophe. People are encouraged to take pride in it as the triumph of the human spirit faced with overwhelming adversity.  Yet more men died than won medals for valour and, anyway, what value is a medal in balance with a life lost? I wrote the poem the day after Anzac Day. It seems OK for now.

Current edit: 21 June 2014

Is it just water carrying me downwards,
Is it just water roaring around me,
Is it just water scurrying before me?
My only wish is to come to shore.

Whose past comes thundering behind me,
Whose now envelops and surrounds me,
Whose vision of the future calls me?
My only wish is to come to shore.

This is no destiny that compels me,
This is no weariness that overwhelms me,
This is not Arethusa’s beauty that draws me;
My only wish is to come to shore.

It is myself that keeps driving me onwards,
It is myself that keeps dragging me downwards,
It is myself that keeps thrusting me upwards,
My only wish, to rest on shore.

.

---

Current edit: 26 August 2015

8 September 2015

15 September

25 April 2016

Lock the door on the night,
Shut out the stars, the cricket’s song,
The whir of annoying wings, the darkness
Unfolded from the opened suitcase
Of someone moving surreptitiously
From place to place, for this place is the place
Where you belong, at least for now,
Behind this strong door, within these walls,
Like water sheltered by a steadfast dam.
Nothing foul plashes,
Splashes or lurks along
The edges here nor drops
Into the garden from the parapet.
No madman mutters secrets by the candle
In the tower, no ghost saunters
Amid the cobwebs of the unoccupied wing.
Those are not bones
Under the kitchen floor.
I have arranged a bed for you below the stairs.
You will hear the timbers groan
If anything comes
Down the rail towards your door, heard
Like the faltering hand of the grandfather clock
In the parlour struggling to get over
Some glitch in the works.
There is no reason why you shouldn’t sleep.
If you do sleep, if you wake in the morning
When birds begin their songs outside
The window and, on the bedside table,
A mug of tea greets you steaming
Grandly like a far-off lake
Throwing off mists in the sunshine,
You will know you have arrived.

.

---

We all suffer from morbid fears of we don’t know what and I have toyed with that idea here. I wanted to break out of rhyme and meter, just for the freedom of it. It looks OK for now.

Banked up in broken ridges, sea foam boils
And dives and spits towards its finish line
Of debris on the beach, a splash of brine
Tumbling in silver fishlike from torn toils.

Beyond the breakers, blue water embroils
A flock of gannets. Silver, serpentine
Wings sliding round the wind thrust, thrust down
Through sky and sea, down like a spring’s squeezed coils,

To snatch at submerged prey then fly up again,
Starting anew the cycle of the feast.
Throughout all this, the idle crowd has lain
Turning and tanning belly, bum and breast,

Confident in its place beside the shore,
Unguarded for a weekend, crude and raw.

.

---

The beach always makes an interesting contrast between the raw violence of the natural world and the tame values humans abide by. This sonnet looks OK for now. I have been churning out quite a bit of poetry lately and now it is time to get back to the novel. The novel is finished but needs at least one more rake-over.

Current edit:

26 August 2015

Self treads on water swept by wavelets: drop-
lets falling draw dark rings upon the sand
A finger’s breadth below the surface and,
In between new wavelets wiping bare the top,
Bursting to nothing circles fade and stop
Sooner than Swiss watchmaker’s smallest hand
Ticks off one second. Each brief pulse began
As spatter flung from trudging toes, plip-plop.

Landwards, gazing discerns a wayward track
Where spine-tied feet dodged the big waves, a weav-
ing in and out between the bric-a-brac
Of seaweed and dead things the high tide heaved

On shore. So many momentary things.
Earth binds me to itself with breaking strings.

.

---

We all love the beach, the youngest for its physical excitement, their elders for its imagery. Beaches are a kaleidoscope of elements and metaphors, all with something to do about life.

Current edit: 14 June 2014

What can I give my father, what can I say
To thank the man now he is eighty-five?
He was the one who always had to give.
He gave me life and he was born today.

He looks so small. How little he must weigh.
It is so difficult for him to move,
For me not to seem too much moved. I lived
This helplessly? So close, so far away?

He finds some strength, looks with a knowing smile
On photos of his youth, his motorbike,
Risking his life for thrills mile after mile.
He gave it all up for my mother’s sake.

He rises from his chair. I hold his hand.
Both can still walk if one of us can stand.

---

I wasn’t brought up to be sentimental and I hope this isn’t. The style is plain, the meaning direct, the affection real.

For us, the lucky ones,
The horror of it lies in metaphor.
A ship that had no guns
Sailing with fervent hopes in search of pleasure
Opened its wrists on cold, hard water
And sank to depths a teardrop cannot measure.

It was unsinkable.
The burst hull berthed against the ocean floor:
Despair repairable?
Relatives of the missing endured too,
Heart-broken, but not any more.
Time, the old captain, pays off every crew.

The band, they say, played on.
We can all take some comfort out of that,
Going but not quite gone:
The journey, not the destination, matters
If mostly all we are is water,
Our conversation just the cold that chatters.

.

---

Disaster stories always have popular appeal because life itself is a disaster.

Dry, dry, dry as dust!
Goodbye to rain,
Old, fair weather friend
Winds no longer send.
The weather vane
Is seized with rust.

Crack, crack, crack, the grass
Cracks under foot.
Earth, forced apart,
Gapes for an implant, a heart.
Mad gardeners put
In a bypass.

Pale, pale, pale the sky
Rains emptiness
And days shrink under
Nights drained of wonder.
Time to confess
Our sins, throats dry.

.

---

Drought is a good excuse for minimalist verse! If you try watering the garden, the water just disappears down cracks and boils in hell.

Current draft:

26 August 2015