Other Poems of Two Weeks 1 (The Badge Of Light Infantry) The mind’s light glimmers on this and hallows Where sun finds red-brown mud on a tissue Of dark, flaking oxide whose shape one knows – Of crown, unit and crescent horn. With due Detachment, we honour service, long-slept Self-sacrifice not to reawaken To true ego or peace that holds except Where small nations have been designed to break. Nothing, no matter what is uncovered, Can live or speak in answer to this raw Reveille, as Winter hears the black word Of crows on sloped Somme farmland’s fertile maw, And what lives and speaks here on today’s earth Is fulsome on a long-dead soldier’s worth. 2 (Mission To Archishman) There’s a pride and elan – a real panache - About the words or songs of believers In ideals of love and mind, and the flash Of a soul’s fire; in marvels, retrievers Work strength and hope for all; their gift - Slaved-for in the cause of Art and thinking Freedom –may prove that man feels the uplift Of optimism, and lives beyond sinking... From this, we can believe over again, To drudge or risk ourselves for perfection And, failing, yet prove ourselves sovereign By outdoing past good in deflection Of the bad in a right concern for all, Just from a love thus proven natural. 3 Auto da Fe 1 Are the questions you ask now sufficient In themselves to interest, and more, sustain you As others flag without the consequent Or past stolidity of mind to bring them through? You must go on or find peace in stillness That schools itself here amid an inner turmoil, And treat these burning doldrums as progress If once undergone with gratitude for one’s toil. Find space and resources in self and be, Much, perhaps, as you have been, patient and quiet; Face what comes without fear or self-pity, For the present short commons must be your diet. Be one of many and yet stand alone, Privileged in being yourself and in sensing And thinking as you do and without show Or advantage except in experiencing Integrity and brilliance as real As strange and inspiring, within this, your own mind. To survive in spite of the common weal Indeed, the stubborn self or soul transcends mankind, Or any species of any planet And at any given time; for the universe Is all spaces and ages in whose set Are folds, curvatures and expansion to disperse One’s anger, jealousy or aloneness. Just despair is in not belonging in one’s Art To Creation, to reason, in express Commonwealth and kinship in a system apart From elitism, exclusiveness and mean Reliance on degrees of worth; upholding greed, Brute narrowness and neglect whose machine Has no God nor Purpose save in its own dire need. 2 What Creation and creativity Have to do with class or class-deprivation Is beyond you, as generosity Of nature despises all crass limitation Of happiness to live and act for good, As the murder of genius and betterment By tyranny and despair not withstood When the World Order is ruled by the decadent. A tiny world, this World Order Nature Is shaped by: angustious and rich in its floors And screens for plots of a nomenclature, Deals and betrayals that its inventors Safeguard crime for crime without reference To us save as victims to be kept ignorant. Despair! When no escape from deterrence And disharmony is found or found consonant! 3 And yet, beyond its jurisdiction, there Are galaxies, suns, planets, moons, and, through worm-holes, Parallels past the imagining, where Man has no power, no purchase, and minds, like turnsoles, Grow towards warmth and light: even the dream Of Measureless Liberty causes us to bloom With the trackless unowned, whose every gleam Or rift of darkness has unroofed the thick-glazed tomb. The power is within you; it is stillness Of an eternity of exchanged life and death, Of constant rest and action for progress Out there and inside – and however you draw breath, You will be with man and the true Cosmos, And yourself develop all you make of their guise As horns of plenty bring forth out of loss New star-systems, new splendours, shaped for loving eyes. A Pavane for our ears; those who hearken Will see through sad despair or doldrums to the sight Of a Court of Heaven, though their surrounds darken With all that defies their wants and cannot be right, To a dance of just slowness and blessed Solemnity touched with the ages’ star-wisdom, Scriptures and theorems whose professed Measures still draw us, indeed, to what was to come. Copyright, Mike Burrows, 02/02/14
Posted on: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 17:38:05 +0000
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