Tag Archives: mortality

Insignificance

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I read great poets, great beacons,
Their eyes so keen,
Their voices clear as sunlight
With a winter slant, harsh,
But welcome all the same.

Personally,
I’ve grown used to irrelevance,
Come to prefer it.
My history of judgment
Is spotty, at best
My place in the grand confusion
Of existence
Is in the chorus,
Oblivious,
One small voice
Bleating among many,
One fading light
In the great kaleidoscope,
Whispering, more than declaiming,
Twinkling, more than illuminating.

But it’s me, inaudible at times,
Barely discernable,
Me

Blood and soil

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Sometimes I think the land,
the kind of soil,
the trees, the vining shrubs,
the water and what swims in it,
what crawls out of it,
these things fill veins
with a stronger wine
than mere genetics.

Feet of clay, they say.
Not much clay in these
Northern parts,
all sand and gravel
pushed and mangled down by
ancient ice,
time after time
until all memory is gone.

You’d think such persistence
would make smooth,
but all I know is raw
and open,
like yesterdays.

1914 III: The dead, by Rupert Brooke

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Tomorrow is Veteran’s Day here in the US.

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.

Prothesis and ekfora

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prothesis and ekfora

The visitation was grand
All about me, wailing,
Giving the glad hand to
Each long lost long ago.

Afterwards
I lay flat in the coffin, feet first,
You leading the parade,
Somber with relief at such endings.

You were angry when I squirmed,
All the same,
Unable to keep my straight-laced face

In spite of the
Droning
Tolling
Bell.

I shouldn’t have taken it all
So lightly.
I should have let the gray noon settle slowly
On my unbeating heart
Like distant longing.

But you have to admit
The element of absurdity:
Me, refusing to lie still,
You, beside yourself
With propriety.

Chance

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…the universe is a big place, where improbable things happen all the time. Look at you.
– John Matson

At its deepest core
Reality is mere chance
A riot of bubbles boiling
And bursting, all unguessed

Unless the ever disappearing
Always borning bodies flung
Into pointless being, seething
In the cosmic whistling teakettle

Unless by the grace of improbability
By statistical nethering whimsy
By the merest intractable stroke
Of lunacy
We come back for the next moment

Again
And
Again