MY MOTHER

You,

my mother,

now being lost

to me again

through waning

memories,

were Jesus Christ

and I,

 I was Simon Peter

who thrice renounced you.

Nothing will be built

on the crumbling sand

I am.

Time

shall wash

me away.

29.01.2019

LIFE

Life is a gamble

you will

lose;

the trick

is to stay in

the game

as long

as possible.

Gambler,

you play

to roll

dice once

more.

29.01.2019

HAPPY ARE THOSE

Happy are those

who learn late

that the life

is not a comedy,

not a romance,

not a rousing adventure

but a tragedy

full of pain, grief

and sorrow -

and death,

above all else death,

and in the end

- death.

29.01.2019

WINTER DUSK

16:31 and

the short winter day is over;

the cold white of the snow

has become warm blue in the dusk

under the overcast sky.

The trunks and snow-laden branches

of the trees

are threading the blue

with black veins.

All movement

has ceased.

In this moment

so fleetingly balanced

between the pale light

of the late January day

and the long dark of the starless night,

timeless eternity

touches the

buried landscape

with delicate bird feet.

26.01.2019

LIFE

What is life?

An attempt

to keep

the gaze

away

from

death.

To

take eyes

away from the

inevitable destination,

to fill the mind

with everything but

the end.

That is life.

26.01.2019

WORDLESS IN MY OWN SORROW

I tried to find words of comfort

for a grief that has shattered a heart;

but I had none,

for my mind was pierced by the same

loss, and wordless

in my own sorrow I was mute

to the pain of my friend.

The dead unite us in loss,

but the loss binds us

in silence.

I turned to the wordsmiths,

to Catullus on his brother's grave

in Troy, on Auden on Yeats,

and more of the same.

But these were monuments

hacked in eternity by the great,

and ours is a sorrow and pain

of the nameless

for their loved ones,

not an ennobling feeling,

not a fine emotion for the learned

of millennia to savour;

ours is the grief of the orphaned child,

ours is the rage against

losing the hand that held our own hand

when we took our first steps

and comforted us against the fears of the night

with the certainty of

loving warmth shielding us forever.

23.01.2019

PYTHERMUS OF TEOS

Nothing else matters, it seems, apart from gold.

Pythermus of Teos (fl. before 540 BCE),

translated by M. L. West(1937-2015)

Pythermus, son of doomed Teos,

writer of songs for drinking wine

in good company, his name

writ in history with one sentence

and Hipponax underlined it.

23.01.2019

ONE WINTER DAY

To Mary Oliver(1935-2019)

Brief is your life,

brief like the sunlight

on a short winter's day.

Late the light

that fills the landscape,

early the twilight

that buries the sun.

From darkness

you came,

to darkness

you return.

Only once did the sun

rise for you,

only once will

you see it set.

All you have

is this one winter day,

sunbeams on the snow,

sunrays on your face.

21.01.2019

ONLY WHEN

Only when

your suffering

matters to me

as much as my own,

only when

my suffering

matters to you

as much as your own,

only then

will our suffering

come to an end.

20.01.2019

DEATH IS NOT SLEEP

Death is not sleep,

for sleep ends

and the dreamer surfaces;

a sleep has a beginning

and and an end

like the life itself,

and like a dream

once dreamed

life never

comes again.

20.01.2019

AFTER IT SNOWED DURING THE NIGHT

The morning's cold

makes me shiver; emerging

in the faint light

blue-tinged snow knee-high,

bitter memories,

sharp like razor-blades

cutting the mind

that knows them.

What lies under

the snow can't rise with the spring,

that which past laid to repose

can never rest in the mind

that remembers; the

past lies with the beloved faces

in a reality beyond years,

beyond the coming and going

of snow and leaves and grass,

bound to the mind

which remembers

and shivers in the cold

of the winter morning.

16.01.2019

AUTUMN IN OCCITANIA

The beautiful lands

of troubadours and 'heretics',

the great flowing cloth

of blood thrown

over the shimmering hills

and green orchards,

the stones of towns

under northern shadows,

the parchments of inquisition

replacing the songs;

the fires on squares

where flesh fell

from hands grasped in prayer;

the great river flows

past fallen arches

carrying bodies of

the plague years.

14.01.-15.01.2019

TURN AWAY FROM DEATH

There is no more pointless subject for poetry

than death;

grief, sorrow, fear

of live's end -

yes, but death itself?

The antithesis of everything that is

or can be?

No.

Let the void be,

look away from it,

write dirges for the lost,

elegy for your years

gone and growing

shorter; give voice

to the fear.

But death, death

beyond that?

Let it be.

14.01.2019

THE ABSENCE

The old childhood fear

in a middle-aged man's heart,

the old words

in a middle-aged man's thoughts:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep,

If I should die before I 'wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

But no warm mother's hand

to reach for in the dark,

no celestial being in the firmament

to hope to save him from the void.

The sleep is the foyer

of death, and

in the morning's resurrection

he knows his fate.

13.01.2019

A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

To Lucius Shepard(1943-2014)

If there is music

to be heard after the heart

beats no more and

no blood circulates in

our veins, when our

bones or ash rest

on the palm of the earth,

if there is music

in the shadows past life,

if there are those shadows

or blinding light, if

if if... Then you have heard

what the cosmos sings

to its children ripped

from flesh, wrapped

in its fabric of void and particles.

If there is music,

if there is silence,

if there is thought,

if there is flickering...

If, if, if... you have heard,

you have heard it,

beyond the veil

in the cooling universe

you've come part

of it's song of life

and death -

the dirge before oblivion

embraces the fading

web of matter.

10.01.2019

THE SHROUDED ONES

Mother Life gives her

weary children

to the waiting arms

of her severe sister, Death.

Warm and crying

she brought them to this world,

cold and with stains of tears

in their faces they leave it.

Sister Death has

the compassion of eternity;

she will take ash and dust

and turn them into stars.

10.01.2019

WHAT WE HAVE GAINED

Beautiful person is good, as

external beauty can't exist without inner beauty;

virtue is tied to person's wealth and status,

like external beauty to inner beauty -

only in together can we have

the perfect man of ancient Greece:

The beautiful, virtuous aristocratic male

not defined by his deeds

but what he possess through birth.

His character is of the hardest marble,

of bronze that can not corrode.

It doesn't change, it endures

from birth to death and to the shadows

of the realm of Hades as Parmidean One.

To the Hellenes in their brightly painted

abodes Dorian Gray would

have been as impossible as Zeus ruling the seas.

10.01.2019

I hear my death coming

in the silence of the January midnight,

see it in the weeping trees

in their white shrouds

crossing their branches.

The night without stars

is descending to entomb me.

10.01.2019

Two cats purring

atop a man on bed.

His chest moves not,

he is like the living

sphinxes on his

cadaver, out of time.

10.01.2019

ARNOLD BENNETT(1862-1931)

No cup of hemlock for him,

tap-water willingly drank

his death-bringer;

his guilt that of the heroes of Hellas:

Hubris challenging fate - but

of the bourgeois kind.

10.01.2019

DAMNATIO MEMORIAE

Living people write

poems in the voices of the dead;

they give words of the living

for the dead to perform,

and among the dead

they place themselves,

like in death they would exist

and have the gift of speech still.

These puppets from their graves raised
speak of how no sorrow

should be felt, how good

were their lives, and

how those passing their tombs

should read the words and remember

them. The old Roman

magic of those not forgotten

still surviving.

They write, the living

with their beating hearts

and brains like oceans of thought,

their veins with full of red blood

swiftly coursing; they write

and see death but life

slower flowing, a lucid dream

with moments of wakefullness interrupted.

A long rest, that good dream of Socrates.

They delude themselves

and those who read their verses;

they comfort themselves

and those readers with lies,

as the truth hurts and devours

all hope and leaves an abyss:

For death is but annihilation, oblivion

of all thought and consciousness;

more escape the grip of the event horizon

of a black hole than escapes the maw of death.

The dead have been erased from the universe.

This is death: Damnatio memoriae.

04.01.2018

AFTER JUDE

What did all those novels

bring? A dreary house of

his own making, where

a barren marriage died -

bitterness that stopped the

pen, when all was bought

and cold was the hearth

and cold were the words given.

So, thirty years, and

back to poems; engraving

on medallions what

he had painted on frescoes -

yearning, stumbling,

falling, noose in the neck

and cold hearth, grave

and conscience's sharp dagger.

All there, those broken

shards of dreams that

kept bleeding the hands

that hold them to write.

02.01.2018