THE GIFT OF PEACE WHICH TIME GIVES

As much despair and anxiety as we feel

living through these days of

dread and vexing times,

take heed that there shall come a dawn

when no one alive now shall be breathing,

when all the pain and loss and fear we feel

is but dead voices on

pages and files and film.

This is the gift of peace which time

in abundance freely gives.

27.03.2020

#Poem #Poems #Poetry #Verse

when tomorrow comes

the male cat keeps scratching

the open bedroom door

demanding my attention

demanding soft food in a sauce

but the little rascals in fur

always leave part of it to dry

never touching it again

so sorry lad in black-and-white

it's just dry food today

you get your meat in sauce

when tomorrow comes

26.03.2020

SOON OVER

one fucking day again

soon over the night

black nothing beyond

this cell cast unlocked

in time and place. one

fucking day again

soon over and lost

like all the people

i lost in the nothingness

standing un-breathing

beyond the windows

and fragile walls

of brick and mind. one

fucking day again

soon over & me.

26.03.2020

I AM NO ATLAS KEEPING UP THE WEIGHT OF THE HEAVENS

To PRC

Gray, iron gray

late March sky

and here we are under

it, and under

the crushing weight of

our feelings; another

one lost, lost for

now - recovered,

at distance, briefly

like a cold lance of

sunlight severing the clouds

as a heavenly herald

of sharp and biting

hope; like that,

a joyous flood rising -

and then: breaking, snapping,

that pale golden lance;

that briefly, and

now lost again;

lost the recovered

one, lost like the sun is

lost behind those

iron gray clouds

kissing the mist

on the barren fields.

26.03.2020

THIS UNNATURAL SPRING

Crystalline light of the late March noon

caresses the bare trees

lining the muddy road;

light that would bring forth buds

of life, palest green on boughs,

if this would but true Spring be.

But the caressing hands of sunlight

under the pale blue heaven

work in unveiled winter

stripped of white snows,

and the Spring lies in the distant future

in this unnatural time of dying.

25.03.2020

LIFE IS BUT A DREAM THAT PASSES

Life is but a dream that passes,

a brief dream before the eternity's

chill withers and lays bare the soul

and to it shows the abyss of oblivion.

Like a ghost haunting a summer night,

the human being passes through the world;

the evening dusk birthed her,

the first light of dawn shall bury him.

Life is but a dream that passes,

a brief dream from which we awaken

not; we are cast into oblivion's embrace,

and all shall cease and be no more.

22.03.2020

WHEN THIS WILL BE OVER

When this will be over, many will be dead

and far more will be living,

and perhaps we will be on separate sides

then, one on the bank on which stand

the living, the other on the one

on which shall lay the dead. But

the river between will keep flowing;

the river of time, of life and death -

and one by one, all who will stand

among the living when this will be over,

shall cross and go lie down

with those who this plague will take.

22.03.2020

YOU LOSE TO YOURSELF

"I challenge myself", the young cocky voice

in the commercial says, full

of the ignorant arrogance of youth;

and I am reminded of a cartoon I once saw,

where to a marathon runner who declares

"I won myself!", a bystander

says, "So you lost to yourself?"

22.03.2020

IN THE SEASON OF DEATH

If death comes, it will come

like a season of death

after the long, languid days

of late summer;

abruptly the trees

are in autumn foliage,

cold wind is ripping

the branches clean;

a leaf here, a leaf there,

and suddenly a rain

of gold, red and brown

falling through the dim air.

Each one a death,

each one a life

lost, falling upon us,

or we falling among them.

21.03.2020

WE LIVE IN A TIME OF DISASTERS

We live in a time of disasters,

not the old comfortable catastrophes of the British,

but full blown apocalypses closing around us,

and truth to be told,

we are not just innocent

victims among the disasters,

we are not just pig-headedly

making them worse

by refusing to put the climate,

healthcare, humans and nature

- the whole fucking, bleeding planet! -

before the billionaires on their piles of hoarded gold,

no, we humans as species are

one of the disasters, scything down

flora and fauna and people,

riding our skeletal horse.

We are one of the Horsemen

of the Apocalypse, the vicious leader

of the pack, garbed in flayed human flesh,

vicious, merciless, suicidal,

leading the world to Armageddon,

through one catastrophe after another;

the eye of the storm, with disasters

whipping around us like hurricane winds.

21.03.2020

THE NIGHT CALL

To PRC

I awaken to the call at three in the night,

fight with the mask to get it off,

rush through the cramped room, and

it's salvage from wrecked lives,

to grab the phone charging from the laptop,

and, still trying to fully surface,

fumble with the touch screen

with my big, fat fingers,

until I get to swipe the green

and hear your voice, angry,

but calm, fully in this world,

rooted to it, and I am relieved

listening to your complaints,

relieved to say that I was wrong

and that you are right,

sorry for what I have done,

just relieved in the midst of the night

to hear your voice,

to know you are there,

you are there and talking to me

in this great night which briefly

in separation connects us again.

21.03.2020

NATURE KNOWS NEITHER PITY NOR JUSTICE

Nature knows neither pity nor justice;

life and death just are,

things that cease and an event that happens,

and then the things that ceased

feed those that breath and move,

until it comes to their time

to decompose for life to grow.

20.03.2020

AT THE TWILIGHT OF AN AGE

The time is late, the day is growing

dark; through the dusk

the first stars glimmer.

Cold are the stars that shine

over the fears and suffering of

the human race;

cold and indifferent like the

mute gods, on whose altars

embers of hope feebly burn.

Orphan in the vast cosmos,

lost on his wandering star,

the human race looks to the falling

night and in fear shivers;

the dawn is a lifetime away,

and whose unseeing eyes

shall not watch the sun rise,

whose cold hands shall not feel

the dew of morning -

no one knows. Death walks

among the orphan race,

and with chill indifference chooses.

20.03.2020

SO YOU ARE SCARED THAT DEATH MIGHT COME

So you are scared that death might come,

that death might come in a week or a month,

the death you have known since first you came

to know it on those days present as distant memories,

the strange childhood ritual of hospital visits and funerals,

in fear and pain shall come for you now.

Always it was there, death, but in the distant horizon,

pushed to future decades hence, pushed to the future

for you. Others it came to take, sudden or through

long years of fear and pain; some you loved, some

you just knew, but you watched all them die.

Deep you believed death was not for you now.

Always it was there, death, but in the distant horizon

for you; a death you saw coming when feeble,

and in extreme old age, you would have been a child again;

a relief for a husk after you had withered away -

only for others was death present in the days we lived in.

Deep you believed death was not for you now.

So you are scared that death might come,

that death might come in a week or a month,

that death would come for you. That in your youth

or prime, or those that should be the golden years,

death will come for you; that fear and pain

you shall know as death comes for you.

20.03.2020

THE DEATH OF AEGEUS

Black sails send a king

falling to the sea;

thus we act

based on simple cues

without waiting

to confirm that our

fears are true.

Thus we,

forgetting what was

promised, doom those

who with fear and trepidation

wait our arrival,

and our simple act

turns rejoicing into a wake.

19.03.2020

TO THE VISCOUNT OF HAUTEFORT IN HIS OLD AGE

The famous Provencal troubadour Bertran de Born(c.1140 - after 1202 and before 1215), entered the monastery of Dalon with his then very young son Constantine around 1195-1196 and was recorded as a monk there in 1197.

We should not think, I believe,

that after those years of scheming up 

and singing of petty wars for petty causes,

Cain fighting Abel, Achitophel raising sons against their father,

you would have truly found religion,

or religion would have embraced you

and redeemed you from war and songs

of war and love.

No, I believe we must assume

that it was old age that came riding

on a fast steed, threw you from your

stallion of manhood and took you it's humbled prisoner,

hauling you to the monastery, a feeble old man,

and you dragging your son with you,

afraid of being alone with monks and their faith

in your dusk.

18.03.2020

IN THE EVENING

We are getting old,

and we are tired;

the twilight has set

and if death would

come, it would but be
a cold, comforting hand

closing our eyes

weary of seeing

the pain and the loss.

18.03.2020

DON'T TALK TO STRANGERS

I was walking in the newly fallen snow

covering the cold, brown earth

on the early March morning,

with Simak's City open in my hands,

when the children passed me

on their way to the school,

and one of them said "Hi."

Taken back, I just made

a feeble "Hello."

What an odd thing, for children

in a time like ours,

to say such a thing to a stranger.

What a dangerous thing for children

in a time like ours

to say such a thing to a stranger!

Don't they know,

haven't they parents said -

don't their parents know! -

how dangerous is to say "Hi"

for a stranger

in a time like ours?

Eyes to the ground,

in the newly fallen snow

covering the cold, brown earth

of early March morning,

without a word to strangers,

no answers if they ask,

no - run if they stop and speak

- that is the way for children

to act in a time like ours...

Because there are bastards

all around the children,

hiding inside the hides

of people looking normal

in a time like ours.

13.03.2020

THE DREAMING

Beside the cats I dreamed of the deaths

that I should never live to see;

and she was still alive, and there, in my dream,

the lost grandmother; with her

I grieved. 'They died out of something...

like love'; 'They died out of lack of light',

said the faceless voices in my dream.

And in the dream I awoke to another dream,

with relief that I had slumbered;

but in that dream they were dead too

and the sorrow came flooding back.

13.03.2020

APOTHEOSIS

When the gods are dead,

and only the fools worship

on their empty graves,

orphan humanity has to face

the knowledge of what she

now must become: A god

to replace those she pulled down;

a moral voice and swift hand of justice

where the cosmos offers none.

10.03.2020

IF THEY EXIST

Nobody believes in God

more than the Devil;

no Atheism for the Fallen Angel

that Man out of Eden could embrace;

but what sustains Satan,

his own creation,

but the God's faith in him?

10.03.2020

AFTER THE PAIN HAS EASED

The pain for hours keenly felt

finally eases; mentally disembowelled

these moments, missing you

all, all the dreams and hopes

that you once put on my shoulders,

wide enough, and which I let

to fall to the ground. Taste of

Purgatory or Hell, it was still

but a small drop from the

ocean of suffering I deserve.

09.03.2020

THE DREAM AND THE DREAMER

The dead had their dreams

like we have ours,

and see what came of them?

Perhaps they gained them,

perhaps they slipped between fingers,

perhaps they were always out of reach;

but now that they are gone,

looking at their solitary graves,

looking at the empty places they left,

how can we know? For a dream

dies with the dreamer and is nevermore,

mortal the dream and the dreamer.

09.03.2020

THE UNBICENTENNIAL MAN

To Isaac Asimov(1920-92)

Dying doesn't make a human being,

it makes a corpse out of flesh

and casts the mind to die

as flame in void dies.

Dying doesn't make a human being.

To desperately cling to life

with fading strenght and mind,

to hope when all hope withers,

that makes a human being -

the will to live and fear of death.

A human being is not a flame

that willingly dies in the void,

a human being is a challenge

mde against death, raging

against the undiverting fate.

08.03.2020

AMONG THE RUINS

In the dying dusk I set out

yesterday, with Christopher's The Death of Grass

in my hands; long delayed

I walked through the brooding,

empty streets and lanes, and

the slushed path down to the valley

and up to the village gloom,

where in my eyes the ghosts

of peoples dead and buildings torn

mingled with what remains,

the feeble remnants of life and men.

The night fell, my hands grew chill;

around the pools of light cast

by lamp-posts I kept reading the

comfortable English catastrophe of future past,

while thinking of the uncomfortable ones,

personal and global, closing in.

So I walked and arrived, in the dark.

06.03.2020

THE MIRE IN WHICH WE ALL DROWN

To PRC

1

You say you can't see -

three, no, now four days

since it started. I said,

and know you won't,

to go and see a doctor.

I fear it's neurological,

but won't say it to you;

I know you think

I would try just to hurt.

You will persevere in this

suffering I have brought

to being, the mire in

which we all drown,

like the ones here -

those which I never

took you to see;

you and me and they,

they who sleep the

dreamless sleep

under the newly fallen snow.

2

I haven't eaten in three days

much more than fried sunflower seeds

(like those you made),

and two kiwi fruits (the

most delicious I ever ate),

have drank endless cups of black coffee

translating Edward Thomas,

so long dead in Arras;

they claimed to his widow

that he died peacefully, a blast

stopping his heart; but

he died a soldier's death, not

of a poet's: A bullet in his chest.

3

The new neighbours

stand out in the snow, talking,

at eleven o'clock in the night;

smoking, I guess, to

shorten their lives. I

try to find reasons to go

into the store tomorrow,

but find less and less reasons

to leave, to walk the

suddenly snowbound earth

when the oblivion like a day in Arras

beckons so close by.

04.03.2020

LIFE OR DEATH ? 

Life or death? It matters not

when you get to our age;

an age more than the years

have counted for us;

the life we lived, the death waiting,

they matter not, when

your mind is tired,

your body longs to rest.

Too many lives have ended,

too many deaths come to pass,

too many through our hands

have left life and been no more,

for us to care about the life

now crawling towards it's end,

the moment that erases all

moments before

and is called death.

Life, death they matter not

when so many lives have ended,

when so many deaths

have silenced hearts and voices

muting the world we had.

If we go crawling on  -

so be it. If we pass

away and someone has to

wash us and dig a grave,

then so be it.

This life, the death

that comes, they matter not.

03.03.2020

AFTER IT SNOWED LAST NIGHT

It snowed during the night,

a white shroud over the land

too late for the winter,

too late for the land.

Only to cover what is going,

to cover what is dying,

to bury under a shroud of white

the world we knew and let pass away.

It snowed a burial shroud

for the land abused by man,

he laments for it now,

for he knows the shroud is his too.

03.03.2020

IN OUR FIRST HEARTBEAT

In our first heartbeat

you can hear

emerging the note

that will overwhelm

the song of our life

and bring forth

our last heartbeat.

Listen to the beating

heart in your chest;

it beats,

it has always beaten

towards death -

it's not the sound

of life, it's

the sound of death.

01.03.2020