Alan HannenLange

Alan HannenLange Poems

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Rain,1914

Come rain, come, fall; hailstorm, light at first, icy spherical, battering,
Then gravity-pulled, melted and stretched, cold as iron, each drop,
Countless as the mocking heathens of this vile post-Victorian world.
Thoughts; sit I, here on this trench stool, guarding, a solitary man;
Of no substance to their eyes; a nothing, an empty nothing,
A good nothing of nourishment for a worm.

Come snow, come, fall; light flakes, floating,
Frozen shapes of unimaginable Creation,
Fall; the beauty of it, beyond us, the beauty of it all.

Tiny, each drop, fall, is formed by a miracle;
For our minds know no more from Nature than Miracle; just so.
Yet is formed, then felled from mind as so often Myth does
And dies, and dies, much like child-like joy, the juice of,
Seeping into ground, hard earth of ground, feeble; just water;
Sit I, so still, here on this trench stool, guarding, a solitary man, just a man;
Of no substance to their eyes; a nothing, an empty nothing,
A good nothing of nourishment for a worm.

Come men, come, fall; like rain we live,
Yet we live, more than the Great War soldier,
Yet still surface shattered, splintered, much like those shells of the Somme,
Enriching the troubled soil with the remnants of men's souls;
For under this manured earth encourages the roots of the God-grieving Donne Flower.

Yet we live, but unlike the men of grieving widows;
Now gone into ground and is forgotten, forgotten because we are,
We were, nothing. Sit I, here on this trench stool, guarding, a solitary man;
Nothing to their eyes; a nothing, an empty nothing,
A hearty nothing of nourishment for a worm.

Come rain, come, fall;
Nourish us all.
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Gannel Lenanne
August 14,2014

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