Diana’s first birthday
Yes, Diana is one year old today, hooray hooray!!!
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.
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.