TRAVEL
Oh marvellous travellers, tell us what you have seen:
The windy legates, driven by impossible seas
Into shore, the long mesdames shifting
Imperceptibly in the windows above the square.
Perhaps your memories will reveal our own mysteries
Above the law, above longing and fortitude,
Mysteries that engage harbours and landscapes
In war and desultory longing.
Soon all travel will be lost or over and
Like the albatross with wings dragging on the deck
Of blunt, vapid ships travellers will
Rouse laughter and unkind tales.
One day, when the world is no longer a mystery
And the kingdom of plants rises to its throne
There will be laughter rather than slaughter
And horses will lift their noble brows and come home.
WHO YOU ARE
Why are you my star? I wonder this sometimes
Not because I wish to investigate you, for
You are beyond investigation, but because
My thoughts drift to portraits of ordinary people
And I cannot see you in those grim, taut faces.
Unphotographable, you
Whisper across the space that separates
Fact from conjecture. I barely
See your green ship of hidden courage
Beneath the smile, the sparkling eye and outstretched hand -
Really I am your blind, invisible familiar
And I live knowingly in your strange land.
THE LIFE FORCE
Strawberries, cherries and an angel’s kiss in spring
Twice times murky, muddy thick stuff
Totally bogged down.
OK I get it - I have to clone something real
An animal, insect, bird, bat
Or plant kingdom. Won’t happen.
After the dinosaurs
And before humans
Its roots would cure the bite of a mad dog,
This rose.
Solid, shapely, you are like a symbol of a bird
An icon, not a feathered fleshy thing
So beautiful, but everywhere
You are beauty right across
My geography, bird.
But what we have to discuss
Is the ant. Till now we’ve not had time
Maybe ants aren’t worth discussion.
But here they are
Performing their life hack on us
Just beyond the perimeter of care.
The cyclone chewed through you, grove.
Big parts of you became stick
And we quickly partitioned those to wood
Something that a living, loving tree is not.
Nests flew from you, limbs cracked and fell
Your force transferred.
In this grove we wait for life to creep from storm
Through tree to our sick frame, our dumb hope for more.
I want to talk about
My love hate relationship with kikuyu.
But it screams and we can’t make ourselves heard
Man, it loves life.
Lizards, hydra and some other things
Grow back like them, that stolon generation.
Kikuyu always makes a comeback, hoki mai
The sequel positively
Nietzschean. So smart of it.
Free range chickens qualify
As mauri
Expressing its force through chancey hen poise
Their proud perspective on the world, free from
Discussion, not bogged down in facts
Interested, leaning in, communicating with the tongue
But staring at response because we get to run
The door, the water, meal and realm.
Eggs, however, are beyond our expertise.
The life force works in wondrous ways.
ADAM AND EVE
Adam and Eve did not occupy a steady state
They evolved, we see Eve grow right there in Genesis
So we can’t compare our own full occupying evoluting world
In a way which says we change they don’t
O felix culpa sure, but only if what went before was
A painted scene or tableau tapestry, but not
An ecosystem (say) or a planet, something that burns through time
And also not the same to our different.