Youth! horizons only horizons,
birds flying and heroic sails
dipping in a silver grey
horizon. The garden high
with trees we climbed-
the broken fences.
At the window a sad mother’s face.
too, silver grey and lost
to the beat of far horizons.
Between two silver greys –
Good-bye, good grief
be with you,
still silent at the window
as the rough road wends away.
War came and broke the rules,
broke lives and nations,
broke open secret boxes,
made smart demonic tools.
Tropical seas, wild forests,
shining dawns and burning suns;
an army tent in the monsoon mud
north of Rangoon and the Shwe Dagon
when Little Boy unpacked a cloud
of death at Hiroshima.
Take off that uniform forget
the magic spell, the perfumes,
the dark-eyed faces of Jakarta and Penang.
Find again your home. (How green the grass is!)
Take up your studies, be the feckless student.
Try painting to relieve the boredom of the law.
So what is art? Il professore, show me!
Those summer days in 1948
Masaccio, Uccello, Della Francesca,
Ah! how beneath the Tuscan skies
Your language opened heart and eyes.
In Florence,Venice, Rome, day after day
all day I questioned the ideal in art
in looking and in longing for.
“I hate and I love .Why do I do so,
you may well ask?
I cannot say but it crucifies me.”
Buber’s I and Thou began
Breaking through the shell
and thou and thou and thou
were shaping out a soul.
The shrouded form of Notre Dame
squats like a sibyl by the Seine.
Deep murmurs in its darkened spaces
and sunbeams painted on the paving stones
were food to me.
Standing on a bridge alone,
nowhere to go,
no ogre underneath the arch,
(the indifferent waters flow)
I met a stranger whom I knew,
an unknown friend came into view.
In city streets and by the river’s edge
I walked the light and shadow of the mind.
The swirling waters of the Whence and Whither
Mirror the golden branch of Who.
“To find yourself you have to lose yourself.”
Wanderer with no prospect,
jobless, what might anyone expect
of me, a motley creature?
So I decided to become a teacher.
A teacher teaches having the truth;
A student listens lacking the truth.
Possible. Let’s try again.
A teacher teaches lacking the truth;
A student listens having the truth.
Sounds better. Now expound.
The teacher knows the truth’s to be uncovered;
The student listens for he knows the truth’s within.
I taught the endings of the French
imperfect tense, the rules of algebra,
the kings and lords of England
and Henry’s wives to unprepare
the boys and girls of London town
for a life unknown.
A grey death was mastering the soul.
I fled to total freedom a la A S Neil.
It aimed to break some chains
but lacked a key to the prison door.
There on the bridge of George the fourth
a book came to my hand that
would not let me go.
To the coming time of slaughter and insanity
it dared to speak of wisdom,
of the wisdom of humanity.
But the words were blown away
in the howling winds that rose
from out of the abyss.
“Between the body and the spirit lives the soul.”
The station tower looked down
on the early morning traffic
and city workers hurrying by;
two strangers meet, he takes her case
and they walk together to a waiting destiny.
Like a lonely cabin in a riotous storm
with breathless gales and a wild sky,
timber thrust on timber
joist on joist,
we tumbled into a sweet and boundless joy.
We joined in holy wedlock
in the 13th arrondisement;
a dubious stranger with a hole in his sole
found anchorage in your trusting love.
Take the seeds and plant them deep
in children’s hearts!
The day will come when they will reap
a fruit invisible.
These hopes were gilded but their gold
gleamed like a speck of dust
where Intuition found a place
it could unfold.
There is no truth that sighs alone
in mountain top or ocean deep
but lives in wakefulness;
while sleepers dream their nightmares,
turn and groan,
others vigil keep.
We harbour in friendship and trust,
but a ship and its crew adrift
on the way that the albatross goes
see the bitter salt sea come in
with the rudder swinging free
when the Word’s on the sighing wind
but only the sigh is heard.
This sky’s awash with deepest orange
raw crimson clouds below
half hidden by the black tree-shapes,
the eye has nowhere else to go
and the heart follows
singing aloft, aghast at that dark earth
as evening dives to night.
Remembering the child alone
walking a night-dark road, street lights
left behind, unseen hedges rustling and
solemn, overarching trees
near to the stars in that black height,
knowing a presence there
piercing the heart with eager ravishment,
vanished when the lamps of home
beamed on the hill.
Shadows race across the ground darkening
hedge house hill field wood lake
and burnished rock sucking the light
from every flower the grass and flowing wheat
and waters’ thousand eyes;
their lost light gathered up like gold
in another land.
Yes there were moments on the way.
The autumn leaves are falling and
the blustering rain makes fresh their dyes
helter-skelter on the sodden earth.
Why all these riches at my feet
And dark storms in the sky?
Close
