Interpoetry


Night-Bird

Through the eclipse of another twelve hours 
in the bad of a man-made world gone wrong,
as our grand-architects of corrupt empire
meet to scratch heads, swill chemical foam, 
pass rumour and intone a death-count of statistics,
my poem goes flying in the dusk like a night-bird,
knowing how to find you, faraway.


Nightfall In The Tropics

An old man reads of experiences in another world.
A workforce regards him as Jupiter above the clouds,
non-productive in the heat of an ambiguous paradise.
The revolutionary soldier is speaking about many things:
the down-to-earth romance of human existence, the roads,
transit-systems, state-funerals, harvests, carnivals,
five-year-plans, hurricane-warnings. Familiar rhetoric.

The workers smile as they catch a word here and there.
Suddenly they sense colour and excitement! The revolution!
But soon return abstracted gazes to the yellow 
face of an antique American clock which was rescued 
from a house of ill-fame in the backstreets of Sancti Spiritus.
Afternoon-shift in the sweat-shop of the people is over.
There is a limit to the labour of God’s angels.


Hog

(for Guildford Cathedral)

Your head protrudes above the skyline
square and hideous over the green ridge, 
simultaneously snout of reddish brick,
smokestack of hell-factory, Belsen chimney.
Hog, obsessed with cosmology and looking
upward in defiance of a lateral spine, your 
architecture is less repulsive than impossible.
And in your doubtfully hallowed spaces
from which all graceful deflection is excluded, 
where the daring feminine parabola’s forbidden,
snub-nosed children of marriages of convenience
between accountants and women of fallen arches 
vacantly mouth a detritus of prayers which
God spits out of his jaws in profound disgust.


Love

Up in the jet-stream is love,
floating above comprehension,
crossing the stratosphere in one step,
breaking every convention.

The field of the impossible expands
as love begin her mysterious adventure.
‘Hold her below!’ say the Lords of Hell.
‘She’s going to transform the whole world’.

See! She lightheartedly puts aside
all self in the mortal wars of pride.
Unconditional is her revocation
of what some have called their right.

Contradiction can be her beginning
but the conjunction is her end.
Insensitivity will mean her descent,
therefore she mounts her tender attack.

Listen! She announces something new,
her own renaissance. She never dies.
Trivial names may seem to kill her.
Under an incubus she lies.

But love will teach her lesson again.
She will leave no heart intact.
She will make idiots that were men.
Strange fools go to her blue skies.

Love is the new superlative
along the days to be discovered,
Every zeitgeist of an age
moves beneath her excellent flag.

Love must be lifted every morning
from all association with the dead.
Love must be laid down again each night
as though for the first and final time.

Where is love in the scheme of things?
Is she doomed by seismic happenings,
ancient vulcanism, plagues,
sombre horrors of our condition?

Love is here to sand with gems
old rubbings underneath continents.
She is here to enlist all forces
in the service of another beginning.

Her army marches under the moon.
Her music is fresh green singing.
Her road is smooth as polarised light.
You glide on a highway of silver glass.

Headstrong is love! See her
accellerating the earthbound man-race.
Utopias have no significance for her
because she is always searching ahead.

Her ray drives the whole universe
towards the bright situation of oneness,
state we revisit whenever we are open
to the very fortunate possibility of love.

Love! Let me go with you. I hate this place,
an insular people of vindictive reflex.
Show me your own country. Very often
I’ve seen your light-blue coast in dreams.
                          
Love! Take me to you. Soon! Tomorrow!
Don’t leave here me with pessimism.
The cities are full of interfriction.
I’ve seen enough of hard-driven life.

Love! Take me with you. Where you think best.
But if I must stay here show me your face
in every face crossing my path as I go
passing below through the shadowlands.