Maud De Mandeville

Of all, yours is the name that
Singularly stands out, Maud.
Two modulating syllables
Like a childhood illness;
And a fixed and determinate end;
Life, as it were, pronouncing
Your name –
This was how he called to you
When, at last, you heard your day spelled out
In his voice.
Were your eyes brown and eloping
With feudal adventure, Maud?
Did the country look on you favourably
With its pretext of idling welcome,
Only to want to kill you sleeping?
Then, rest Maud, I’ll say it,
Your tannic name,
And break the hymn of words
That act out life;
Every straw and bean of it.

Christmas, 1982

All Christmas Eve a still.
Carol singers’ jingled hymns
Anticipate a morning’s agile
Glory, puddings, ovens breathing thyme.

I watch the sky go dark.
On the way for midnight‘s solemn mass
I look upwards for the sole star’s spark;
Faith the slaughter will soon pass.

A dry cold sombre expanse, there.
No place for stoic
Or unwavering cares.
There’s only Christmas logic.

In the trinket of a toy
There is nothing other we can do
But serve the day with a tiding of joy
Welcoming all that’s good, or new.

Hammock

In the tree here, up high
A wind is caught, it bends in
One complacent sensation;
Corroded adrenaline

Of summer mizzen in leaf,
Widths of unkempt horizon;
Fair weather that lies ahead.
And at mast, here’s no reason

When the leaf falls; it’s saying
It’s ripe, you know; I listen ..
To the hidden tale, in boles;
Silent sentinels going on,

Then telling storied fables
Of giant forest lore, of all
Who trek in the wonderlux,
And sprightly animal souls

With papier-mâché heads:
And such and such you can read,
Baron drakes or lady ducks,
Not imagining the creed

Tied to their unwholesome skulls,
Bandaged crossbones hoisted up,
A lanyard dangling down.
The blue sky never passing.

Harvesting

I listen to music as it unfolds, long notes
That over and over change, and even the ear
Fails, not interpreting what it hears as echoes.
It’s as if, wait, the image in the thin mirror
Is deaf. No one else has listened attentively.

With a blade we hold the ritual in the field
To measure all the unmeasured under-earth growth,
And meticulous we wait for indulgent yields
To earn the prospect of the sun like gold profits.
We go by enfranchised in a short rhapsody.

We go dance in the wheat, it grows abundantly.
And at weddings we manage its song’s instant joy.

Voice

in memory of innocents, dead

The voice on the radio
Comes days later after the bomb
And scratches like a needle
We barely hear it; none believe

It arrives on top of
Pandemonium and hangs above a church
The bushel of a blistering bouquet
A union in belief

It has sprung from a seed so small
It will fill the fields
With the women and children
Of this earth, the black soil

The angles are all departing at once
And feather up into a cloud
As if mounted on a tree
A white gown spread over the shaken earth