Stone, baked by summers
long since forgotten by
the living and the dead
races furrowed fields
across countryside lanes
as a spring-dew sunrise
reveals its scars
Tag: poem
Reave
When there was no more
land to steal
and the people were made
wraiths
the last syllable of
the old tongue had been spoken
it was not enough.
Liberate
Rise like a single ember
caught in ecstatic swirling
tendrils of soft smoke
Rise like the first shoots
of a tentative spring
Rise like the Sun
greeting the East
Rise, rise together.
Irish (summer?)
Slate-grey winds beckon
an inauspicious August
marking the end of
a moody Irish summer
the starburst sunshine
long since past
more legend than memory
as rain falls in silent sheets
Two thousand and five
Moments long past
come forth, afresh
as if they arose
incorruptible, from the crypt
oblivious to the passage of time
each year since no more than
a mild nuisance
the bell rings on the dot
clear as dappled dew in the shade
8:30, first period geometry
on top of the hill, seven staircases up
the first day of the rest of my lfie
on an August day, unsure if school
means that summer weather is now
somehow improper
a continent, an ocean, a decade apart
yet no more distant than
the tips of my fingers
Valor
Valor is
a false king
on a crimson throne.
Scarlet rivers
Azure rivers flow
entwined, a
force of nature
while
their scarlet kin
exist
persist
drawn from
courageous hearts
The suburbs
The suburbs
a continually cracking
edifice to an illusion
Moonlight
My friend tells me
moonlight collects in
pools each night
yet in the morning
I find only
water •
The centre cannot hold: Yeats and 2017 disintegration
William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” the year after World War I. It’s better known for the line “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” which definitely captures 20th century war and progress. I was re-reading it, and felt that parts of it, in particular the first stanza, hit way too close to home in 2017.
Here is the full poem:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?