Epithalamion

The moon, an honoured wedding guest,
came down to the end of the village street,
huge, warm and yellow, roosting among
the storks’ abandoned chimneytop nests
on the low-pitched roofs of plastered cots,
the gallopers on the starry path
showering sparks from their silver hooves.

In the morning, we trooped down to the field,
a black cat, startled, crossing our path,
led by Zoltan the shaman with staff and drum:
broke bread, drank wine, in a circle of friends
as horses grazing on the mead
casually wandered across to look,
amiably nuzzling – and broke the ring.

Back in the capital that night,
in a water castle in a lake,
the Gypsy fiddlers struck up the dance
under the arches of ringing stone,
as I did the rounds of the bridal feast,
cold, culture-shocked and paranoid,
wondering what it was going to cost.

At the midnight cusp of the equinox,
we stood candle in hand by the cloister well,
celebrating the union
of man and woman, like night and day,
dark and light, in harmony:
Diana already curled in your womb,
a little New Year’s gift to the world.

Diana and the Beans

Diana warbles in delight,
watching the green beans pop from their pods
on her high chair’s clean white plastic tray;
each inconceivably verdant bead
of the salty Japanese treat
bouncing flush with a vernal spring;
only now can her little throat
and her infant mouth form sounds so sweet

– she twists and jumps in her baby chair,
sends them flying with a slap of her palms.

Psalter

The round year ends as it began,
in cold and darkness. Hovels crowned
silver and ermine hug the ground
consigned to succour fallen Man.

Clarion calls from ramparts stir
pale equerries. Beasts of the chase
flee vainly across park and chase,
pursuers plying whip and spur.

White leper beggars pick their lice
in apostolic misery.
The pure knight sports bright livery,
bar sinister his gross device

– honour abated. Evening bells
fade in the shade of forest eaves;
worn friezes of Adam and Eve
adorn the kerbs of healing wells.

Court minstrels recount epic gests
by amber-spitting pine brands’ blaze.
Crutched scribes painstakingly erase
the classic past for palimpsests.

In bone-white choirs, the moon alone
traces hoar rood and reredos;
the wayfarer sleeps in the close,
head pillowed on the bethel stone.

Vials bottle the saint’s golden pains
in philatories round the walls,
Christ’s weapons blazoned on the stalls.
The priest’s starched alb bears clotted stains.

Heiligenschein round ice saints’ busts
lights mountain paths. As croppers thresh,
God’s burning scourge flays spotless flesh
for the shocked witness of the Just,

appalled to find such awful things
a proper attribute of Him:
even the ardent seraphim
hid their faces in their wings.

Elegy I.M. Mick Imlah

You were a world away; I had lost touch
some years ago, and we were never close;
I really had no special call to mourn.
But it struck me hard as an unseen low beam
– dull, sickening, a suddenly solid void –
on reading the obits, the notices:
news of a good man’s undeserved bad death,
denied all dignity and stigmatized
presenting signs; your diaphragm, so strong
when driving rhythms, forgot how to breathe,
and you passed like water into sand.
As Scotland keened, another voice fell still,
gathered to the shades before your time
regardless, folded in night’s quiet wing:
English, that took you for its avatar,
now that more narrow-minded and inane.
Poetry spoke you, as it does us all,
into being: now the song is done,
drowned out by mute clamour of dumb tongues
of headstones speaking silences, not words,
and grave earth stifles muffled epilogues.
So whether it’s my place or not to eulogize
in elegaics, I let your work speak
and leave your own words as your hero stone,
on your tongue, the dull obol, Charon’s fare,
alchemically transmuted into gold.

Early Rising

Morningtide floods through shoals of rippled cloud,
dawn sunshine daubed across the bedroom wall;
my daughter playing with a crystal ball,
the rainbow angels dancing round her head.

Nightlights still burning strong outlast the night,
curtains thrown wide, no sanctuary for
the shadow animal on the second floor;
the whole house, open, breathes in morning light.

Mackintoshes

I’m writing this to tell my baby daughter
– who took my pen to chew just now – about her
rambunctious forebears, Papists or Dissenters,
before they were Glasgow artists or inventors:
nine hundred years of sanguinary glories,
blood-fuelled vendettas, feuding feudatories,
feral mosstroopers, breekless in the heather,
sleeping out plaid-wrapped through all Highland weather;
conveniently detained during Flodden,
second at Bannockburn, first at Culloden;
Jacobite malcontents, staunch in lost causes,
schooled by reverses and misfortune’s tawses;
clan wildcat totem for crest and supporters,
red lion, boar’s head, heart in hand, ship quarters;
proud bearings passed through gentleman and peasant,
from those ancestral mountains to the present
ludicrous days of raincoats and galoshes:
ferocious, feckless, fearless Mackintoshes.

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.