| |
Der christliche Entschluss, die Welt hässlich und schlecht zu finden, hat die Welt hässlich und schlecht gemacht.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
I
These purple foams of grass flower pulse across
The breathing world, which blows with boredom’s sighs,
And drifts through heaven, counting gain and loss.
What mark can one soul hope to realise?
The glossy songs of Sleep, so soft and warm,
Can lull the willing with enchanted dust.
But, even in idleness, in kicking stones,
However mean, does man not change Earth’s form
In some small way? He must!
Such trivia yet redeems his futile bones.
II
With pebbles I cannot myself delude.
This field with its heaving bosom swells,
And falls beneath its leafy mantle crude.
The slow, deep gasps dislodge the bees from wells
Of nectar; work abandoned incomplete.
I too was shaken by this world from dreams,
From futures never born I laboured at.
To change more than the outline, O how sweet!
To shred Earth’s very seams,
And burst from pregnant pause grown over-fat!
III
And then I hear the bird. What music light!
What quirky minstrel sings this plaintive tune?
Within a shroud of song this unseen wight
Would wrap this evening; with my soul commune,
And take my mood, whimsical and weird;
Take all my feelings, fused in one full voice.
Your throat shall sing my heart, and for an hour
Our spirits thrash as one; half man, half bird.
And then a child’s caprice,
Undying nymph, besets me from your bower:
IV
I would forever fly with you where fields
No longer have the power to call my name;
Through realms where hope to truth ne’er yields,
And every man might have his turn at fame.
Your shaded world has melodies in droves,
Sees verse be valued higher than all things.
There is no hush outside at eventide,
For even when it might seem so, air moves;
There on your velvet wings,
A second hearing proves with song t’is plied.
V
Fly! Fly me to your dusky world, I hear!
For I am one with you, I shall not change;
Shall watch the world of men quite disappear
Beneath us and shall not lament its mange,
Its shabby, aging, artless lot: I call!
Come, take me to your balmy midnight groves,
And sit with me and we shall sing in dark
Of Beauty that shall never age and pall,
Abused by fashion’s shoves
And thrusts to place her on a modern bark.
VI
Your song of quaintest Beauty will not age.
From faintest times forgotten to this day,
Those eight notes from the Blackbird’s flute assuage
The fevered brow, the famished ear, allay
The doubts that loveliness might still exist,
Or man be capable of nobler thought.
No, we two, you and I, shall not set sail –
We let them seek the psyche, make the fist;
Their puerile fight is fought
For modern art which Beauty must curtail.
VII
Then let them fight their war on olden times,
With politic, misanthropy and bile,
Revisionism, scorn for form and rhymes:
All revolutions last the shortest while.
O you shall be there prompting, feathered sprite,
When merely breaking ground is out of mode;
And they shall hear our song again and dance,
As roused Apollo’s harp rings clear and bright.
A little up this road
Waits Beauty – those who worship will advance.
Samuel Reed
|
|
User Rating: |
|
--
/10
(0 votes) |
|
|
|
E-mail this poem to e friend