New poem
Lantau
Our house looks east: dawn rays relume
Arcadia door and balcony
opening on the endless sea,
forming one wall of our front room;
and at this time of year, the sun,
rising between my feet, unshrouds
obscure horizons stretched beyond
islands ephemeral as clouds.
The earth prostrates itself before
the progress of god Helios,
echoing light’s footfalls across
the ocean’s polished ballroom floor;
cutwater of a hydrofoil
etches its wake across the calm
annealed by light’s prismatic oil,
annointed with chrismatic balm.
A full moon querned the night’s black flour,
milling the star-chaff angels glean,
filling the beamy lofts between
the blue hour and the golden hour;
now radiant day resumes its realm,
sunbeams flood streambeds, coursing down
the valley walls to overwhelm
shadow’s levees round field and town.
The mountaintops are glorioled,
round sapphire cupola of sky,
mosaic saints exalted by
the spiritual light of gold,
and wooded slopes throw back the roar
of ‘Great Pan lives’, great Pan reborn
panikon deima – sounded for
the piper at the gates of dawn.
Such bell metal-tongued calls break through
life’s brassy everyday pizzazz
in settings as prosaic as
a supermarket checkout queue:
prophetic conscience wakening
in an unprophetable time;
words come unbidden, following
the happy accidence of rhyme.
Far off, the old world’s heat death throes
twist under Nature’s interdict,
voracious scavengers evict
the Himalayas’ homeless snows.
Apocalyptic angels’ vials
descant on our stupidity;
the Furies’ chorus now reviles
lost souls’ loveless cupidity.
But, at a distance from it all,
I see, as if in Merlin’s glass,
everything that came to pass
since the Temptation and the Fall;
fit for my wife and child to live,
a magical, enchanted place
where I can ultimately give
my contribution to the race.