A Death I Die

Loch Earn, Scotland

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.

T.S. Eliot (The Journey of the Magi)

I wrote this poem, as I did several of my recently blogged poems, many years ago.
In ‘A Death I Die’ below the sober thoughts reflect a dark  mood,  the reason for which I now have no recollection.   For me, at the time of writing, they obviously represented the Shadow, that halfway house between knowing and not-knowing,
between what is and what might be,
between Eliot’s ‘the motion and the act’.

A DEATH I DIE

I have no heart for selfish love
that starts and ends with flesh.
It leads along an endless path,
it binds, compels afresh.

There is a sort of death I die;
Am killed and kill myself.
I am alone in this. I am a willing suicide.
I go on a journey bearing my own end.

This death is a habit, a nasty selfish habit
I know and hate it.
I both give and receive.
The giving is good
– but also a habit.

Receiving – an infinite regression.
We plan the means and the end is all.
Purgatory is the cemetery, time the resurrection.
And All is planned that This should be so.

Stanley Spencer – A Happy Resurrection

Photograph of Spencer at work in Cookham Village … by WHB . . . 1957

Stanley Spencer, CBE RA (1891 – 1959)was an English painter. Shortly after leaving the Slade School of Art, Spencer became well known for his paintings depicting Biblical scenes occurring as if in Cookham, the small village beside the River Thames where he was born and spent much of his life. Wikipedia

The sleepers awake
from an imagined death
A teasing adventure in insubstantial earth

Pram pusher extraordinaire
in the Village that lit up his life
inspired his vision
Trundled easel hearse
put to work in progress
To see, to feel, to breathe
destiny on the village green
The past become the present
resurrected in tranquillity
Life-lite under the churchyard yew
this moulded flesh – full featured
bringing joy from the stern grave
Life’s resurrection imagined
in hope and the churchyard
in his eyes and his pigment
Drawn and deified
Death and Resurrection as Spring
As buttercups in the greenest of fields.

The sleepers awake
from an imagined death
A pleasing adventure in insubstantial earth

Stanley Spencer: ‘The Resurrection, Cobham … 1924-27. Tate Gallery

3. Three British Artists CLERIHEWS

A Clerihew is a comic verse consisting of two couplets and a specific rhyming scheme, aabb.  It was invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) at the age of 16. Normally the first line names a person, and the second line ends with something that rhymes with the name of the person. (From: ‘Shadow Poetry’).

Since Damien Stephen Hurst
Onto the YBA scene he burst,
With dead sheep and bejewelled skull,
Artsy Life has never been dull.

David Hockney RA
Is top-of-the-pile I would say.
His reds, his blues and his greens
Are just bursting out of his scenes.

I sing of Sir Stanley Spencer,
Painter of Cookham’s splendour.
May his ‘Resurrection’
Inspire introspection.

N.B. The Young British Artists, or YBAs^[1]—also referred to as Brit artists and Britart—is a loose group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London in 1988. Many of the first generation of YBA artists graduated from the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths, in the late 1980s, while the second generation mostly came from the Royal College of Art. (Wikipedia)

While Time Ticks On: 2-word Tales #15

Pen&Wash-WHB

WHILE TIME  TICKS  ON

Time tells
Its tale
Tick tock
Tock tick

If truth
Be told
When time
Runs out
I won’t
Be stressed
I won’t
Be tired
Just sad
Wist-full
Pen-sive
Love-sick

Yet still
Hell bent
To start
With zeal
Pre-pared
To do
Just what
It takes
To live
A-gain

Next time
In peace
Con-cord
Re-pose
While time
Still there
Ticks on

 

PROUD PROW

‘Thames canal boat’ …..     Photo – WHB  2019   ©

Not quite
the chair she sat in
the burnished gold
Of its throne
proud prow
so prominent

promising power
and privilege
but
nevertheless
a statement
burned on the water
of its thames-side berth

a metaphor
proudly protesting
the humility of
being ordinary
of being old
yet proud with
the magnificence of age
the decadence of time
the innocence of resurrection

NOTE:   T.S.Eliot, in his poem, ‘The Waste Land’ (Lines 77-79:  Part II. A Game of Chess) quotes Enorbarbus, who, inAct II, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s tragedy ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ describes Cleopatra’s royal barge as it appeared when she first pursued Marc Antony:’The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, Burned in the water. The poop was beaten gold.’

‘Thames canal boat’ …..     Photo – WHB  2019   ©

 

Reverie #5: On Birth

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

 

I remember Birth . . .

Warm womb,
emerging
into cold January,
suckled and succoured
into the life
and death 
of a warring world.

Heedless 
of pain 
of worry,
my unconsciousness
nestled in love,
cocooned in blessings,
future undetermined
but on course for
the perdition of
being ordinary.

One more mouth
to be fed,
one more life to be led;
another census tick.
Reconstituted dust
become bone,
flesh and vital blood,
to be both burden
and blessing. 

Only now,
a life lived,
aware that it is
irrecoverable
here to be forgotten.

Until resurrected
in whatever next there may be.