Punishment

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeuur

of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

 (Seamus Heaney)

LOOK, NO HANDS

Even if I had no hands

I would be ambidextrous

Ac-dc in a strange sort of way

Though women would still be kings

Or should that be queens?

Even if I had no legs

I would still walk tall

Play legless football

If the fancy took me,

Roller-skate differently, that’s all

Even if I had no mouth

I would still speak out

Words would continue to pour forth

I would not be silenced

I would speak from the heart

Even if I had no eyes

I would still see plenty

Believing would be seeing

And if only in my mind’s eye

My vision would still be twenty-twenty

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REFERENDUM ME ARSE

The wealthy sip their lattes

On Hampstead’s cobbled streets

The new Fabians still bemoaning

‘Nature’s obstinate refusal

To make the rich innately superior

To the poor they are forced to greet’.

They still care more for the moral high ground

Of progressive liberalism

Than the lives of working/non-working poor.

Those leafy lanes that once sheltered Marx and Engles

Miliband and Foot is now a Tory enclave

Forever England only in the wealth that it can wave.

American financiers in pink shorts and baseball caps

Have long since replaced the  poorer Jewish emigrant

Which once gave Hampstead its artistic liberal slant.

PECKER DUNNE – LAST OF THE TRAVELLERS

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This is a great poem.

WAKING EARLY SUNDAY MORNING by Robert Lowell

O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall –
raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die.

Stop, back off.  The salmon breaks
water, and now my body wakes
to feel the unpolluted joy
and criminal leisure of a boy –
no rainbow smashing a dry fly
in the white run is free as I,
here squatting like a dragon on
time’s hoard before the day’s begun!

Fierce, fireless mind, running downhill.
Look up and see the harbor fill:
business as usual in eclipse
goes down to the sea in ships –
wake of refuse, dacron rope,
bound for Bermuda or Good Hope,
all bright before the morning watch
the wine-dark hulls of yawl and ketch.

I watch a glass of water wet
with a fine fuzz of icy sweat,
silvery colors touched with sky,
serene in their neutrality –
yet if I shift, or change my mood,
I see some object made of wood,
background behind it of brown grain,
to darken it, but not to stain.

O that the spirit could remain
tinged but untarnished by its strain!
Better dressed and stacking birch,
or lost with the Faithful at Church –
anywhere, but somewhere else!
And now the new electric bells,
clearly chiming, “Faith of our fathers,”
and now the congregation gathers.

O Bible chopped and crucified
in hymns we hear but do not read,
none of the milder subtleties
of grace or art will sweeten these
stiff quatrains shoveled out four-square –
they sing of peace, and preach despair;
yet they gave darkness some control,
and left a loophole for the soul.

When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag-
pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad.

Hammering military splendor,
top-heavy Goliath in full armor –
little redemption in the mass
liquidations of their brass,
elephant and phalanx moving
with the times and still improving,
when that kingdom hit the crash:
a million foreskins stacked like trash …

Sing softer!  But what if a new
diminuendo brings no true
tenderness, only restlessness,
excess, the hunger for success,
sanity or self-deception
fixed and kicked by reckless caution,
while we listen to the bells –
anywhere, but somewhere else!

O to break loose.  All life’s grandeur
is something with a girl in summer …
elated as the President
girdled by his establishment
this Sunday morning, free to chaff
his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,
swimming nude, unbuttoned, sick
of his ghost-written rhetoric!

No weekends for the gods now.  Wars
flicker, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance.
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life …

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war – until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

VARIATIONS ON A TURD

You see them everywhere these days

Dark mushroom clumps

Sprouting incongruously

From tarmac and concrete

In gutters and gullys

Clustered around lamp posts

And nestled in  the roots of trees.

Sometimes they squat

Outside your front gate.

They even thrive on grass!

THE MEANING OF LIFE

At the forefront of knowledge

Is the edge of uncertainty

Where reality is really

Only a projection of information

At the rim of the universe.

There, black holes loiter with intent.

They seek to break the sacred laws of physics

Which, as everyone knows, state

That information cannot be destroyed.

This is the point of no return.

All the information that ever existed is here

And black holes are held at bay – for now

What is inside is not inside

And what is outside is not outside.

We are merely holographic projections

Rendered flesh at this event horizon.

Asimov, of course, knew this

Way back when computers

Were not ten-a-penny.

He knew the truth, or guessed

That the universe is one vast computer itself

And we are merely its slavish programmers.

Though not living out purposeless existences,

As some believe,

But proving that life does have some meaning:

We are the way for the universe to know itself