New Poem
Lullaby
(for Diana)
Hush, little baby, I implore,
and let your mother sleep some more,
and you shall have a treasure trove
of everything that comes with love:
the Christmas tree with all its lights
keeping its vigil through the night,
dry corncobs hanging on a string,
pumpkins and gourds, and festive things;
a water castle in a lake
to charm your dreams where, for your sake,
messengers ride north, south, east, west,
to fetch you back whatever’s best –
the bees’ sweet gold in crystal jars,
white diamonds fallen from the stars,
tame singing birds with rainbow feathers,
the amaranth that blooms for ever,
a cross-eyed robin on a card –
while household presences stand guard
over your head, cosily wrapped
and cradled gently in my lap,
the perfect circle of good faith,
unbreakable, to keep you safe.
All this I promise you, and more,
so let your mother sleep some more.
New poem
The Night Angel
(for Lilla)
It is the night angel, the bright night angel
who clears the dark spirits from the skies;
her long gown covers the round world over
and stars are mirrored in her eyes.
New Poem
Fantasia for Woods
Green ivy creeps down crumbling walls
of rotting marble, swamps and drowns
the white acanthus: broken crowns
embossed with dark oak apple galls.
Gold motes waltz in the cool wood’s gloom,
transfixed in stillness long accrued
and pooled in lightwells; yew glades brood
where bluebells ring an empty tomb.
Shades’ fingers trace a sundial,
telling the Jacob’s ladder rungs;
butterflies sip with watchspring tongues
at muddy footpaths’ puddled bile.
Their wet pelts dripping, sleek beasts prowl
through leafshadow’s thick forest glass,
brushing dark swathes through dewy grass,
observed by the unblinking owl,
and ancient woodland’s holy grounds
hear late the flutes of twilight pine;
frosted with silver sylvanshine,
hewn trees weep jewels from their wounds.
New Poem
Rain Garden
(for Lilla and Diana)
This garden is the falling rain:
fresh plashes are its shoots and sprays,
the raindrop ripples are its blooms,
the petrichor its sweet bouquets.
Dewberry buds hung on each bough
blossom in rainbows without light
to grow this garden of the mind:
this garden only grows at night.
Somebody else’s gush
I just came across a gushing Editor’s Note in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers that deserves a refutation – actually, it deserves being pissed on from a great height. After some excusably rhapsodic prose about the cover shot of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses (which my 5-month-old daughter likes), Mary Gannon says:
“It’s through reading that we engage with the larger truths of being human. In books, we experience our private struggles as universal and come to realize the value of compassion, which is the first step toward creating a more civil and culturally rich society.”
What self-serving nonsense. Personally, I engaged with the larger truths of being human by watching my daughter being born, facing personal catastrophe, falling in love, all kinds of other occurences. My experience of those may have been slightly influenced by what I had read, but no way was my confrontation with what it means to be human happening on a page, or a screen, in the form of words.
I may have had the good fortune to learn from some of the finest minds in human history by reading, but that happened because they happened to write, and language was a uniquely durable medium for preserving and passing down what they said and thought. But it delivers a residue, nothing more. Over time, of course we’ll elect for the best, but to dignify reading with the merit is the worst kind of media-is-the-message fallacy.
The best and finest who didn’t write are unjustly mute, cut out of personal contact with generations to come. They don’t deserve that exclusion. And reading doesn’t deserve that elevation. A fine and private thing, yes, but reading in itself doesn’t lift you above the pack, take you higher, do whatever else it is that someone casting about for a spurious sense of self-importance wants. When I see the kind of bilge that sluices through any genuine list of “New Books In Print”, and reflect that much of that stuff will actually get read, it’s enough to devalue the act of reading. Plus, when someone starts telling you that the ultimate good of private act X Y or Z is not personal and private, but for society, you know that they’re a bogus apologist.
Reading is one arena, only, where the confrontation with human reality may start. Rather than compassionate, it is terrifyingly dispassionate. And it is likely to fail you, like most every such confrontation. Read if you dare, at your peril. Go on, read.
[Top]New poem
Sentosa
Sun, sea and sand, and torrid spring
set all the East at play;
I trod you like a cock his hen
that Easter holiday.
Your blue eyes burned right through your head,
the clearest I had seen;
red sealing-wax palms flared against
the dark of forest green.
Forked lightning earthed into the sea
against a stony sky:
shock-headed coconuts bowed low
before the storm’s blow-dry.
The air was warm, the beach was clean,
the weekend crowds were blithe,
and to complete the seaside fun
I buried you alive.
An orchid blossomed in your mouth,
a stoup of purple wine;
the Asian shore’s southern extreme
stretched down towards the Line.
A bucketful of stars
Lilla goes up to the roof and comes back down with a bucketful of stars for baby.
[Top]New poem
Fort Canning
Easter bells ring over Singapore,
filling the evening sky above
the terrace and the shining blue pool;
house geckoes chirrup around the fans
orbiting slowly overhead,
and old friends meeting you the first time;
“She’s lovely”: the same words everywhere
across age and race, culture and clime.
New poem
This is a revised version of a sonnet I wrote earlier. You can click back in the previous Poetry posts to find the earlier version, if it interests you
We stake ourselves on words’ illusive boons:
Odin hung on the trunk of Yggdrasil
nine nights self-sacrificed to win the runes,
howling, full stretch, impaled by his own will;
since we’re not born that way, with silver spoons
shoved in our mouths, but bound to hone our skill
through inane phases fickle as the moon’s
two faces, though it may be all worth nil.
While some read destinies in blood and earth,
I put down my roots in black and white,
careless of my accident of birth;
talking up my idiolect to write
off earth’s grubstake in me, for what it’s worth,
from scratch, charged with the debt I must requite.
Washing for Diana
I strip naked and wash myself to welcome my daughter into her home.
It’s a very practical ritual. When her waters first broke, Lilla did a Marie Celeste from the kitchen just after a pan of cocoa boiled over on the stove. Four days subsequently, there were floaters of mould on the surface of the chocolatey water in the pan. I had to wash everything. And until Diana has had her BCG, we have to be constantly on the alert against tuberculosis spores. So we will have clean room conditions, strip off and scrub down constantly.
[Top]