What, are we in limbo – The street filled with skeletons And faces deathly white? Pallid, strangely festive, Sun still high, dusk not yet set – All the in-betweenness of life And death combine in suburban street. Scout Hall silent for once in the week And houses ring with trick or treat Before the day the faithful pray And make oblation for the dead And for the lost ones, limbo-dreading, Souls unsure of where they stand, The cost already paid and yet Strange parties rage, the in-between The only place we know.
Timid Heart
Timid heart, Scared of dirt, Frightened soul, Fleeing all, Fledgling man, Adam-stained, Broken saint, Breathing faint, Ageing child, Lost and wild, Fractured mind, Wounded, blind, Death-marked Cain, Madman, sane, Searching eyes, Veiled skies, God-child dead, The curse unsaid, Ransomed One, The curse undone. Timid heart, Scared of dirt, Grace-scarred hand, Eternal plan.
W.H. Auden: Undoing the Folded Lie
As October draws to a close, it’s time for an essay to draw together our month spent with W.H. Auden. He is a controversial figure in Christian poetry, and so this essay comes with a minor warning that it may not be to everyone’s reading taste. But he is, I think, still a rewarding poet to look at, for all his weaknesses and for some of the problems that he presents as a Christian writer. I hope that you all find it an interesting read.
This is the day –
leaves dance in spring-wind, the flowers sit and sway and calm the street. The still-point-petals line the garden; brick-walls gleam and fence-posts stand attentive to the silent day. The day hums in rest; the hearers sit in garden, music in their unsure ears, shy before unfolding yawn. Radiator-bars warm, the slow sun as yet contained in veil. This is the day, the thankful day. Birdsong twines with road-work buzz; dazzled life wanders in dancing patterns. Inattentive workers, pause: rejoice now and be glad.
Audenesques
For my last Auden poem for the month, I have decided to fuse much of his poetry together in this homage to his work, great and humble alike. Along with the many famous, more memorable poems, Auden also wrote several poems which were kinds of collections of miniatures, poetic vignettes, sometimes sweet, sometimes stark and pointed. I have decided to pay tribute today to this, lesser-known side of his work. There are many poems which are referenced and which have inspired me in this poem – too many to name. The eagle-eyed Auden fan might like to spot them…it could be a fun weekend game…The first one has been done for you.
Audenesques Fate succumbs many a species; one alone jeopardises itself. (W.H. Auden, “Marginalia”) 1. Street congealed in traffic, I pause, sip long black and rest to ambient chatter in café. Music wafts love songs to Man and what singers know, I too concur: that all of this is somehow glorious – yet sullied; beautiful to blemished eyes: a rose which, pock-marked, attracts the trampling of eager feet. Love expressed in the rose; yet what expressed in the trampling? Feet powerful in the steps they tread? For now these surfaces must suffice; forget the oppositions or how short the long black lasts. You smoke; I should exercise we all spend too long in cars and every heart needs the exertion of bowing. Today it rains; though it is spring, the air smells just like winter. Forget, forget. The street will pass you by. Men on missions grab their drinks and go; wedding guests pause between “I do” and “Raise a glass.” 2. In the afternoon, he walks the dog. Things-to-do and e-mails blink; the stillness races. . . . Beside the library window, she sits, beanie-clad, smart phone in hand. In a world enclosed, she is unknown. . . . Books stay closed; computers flash. The world is coded and our souls do not know the code. . . . The sea gives up its silent pearls; Margetson on the toilet wall. She sells seashells by the seashore. . . . Who, then, are we? We who sit complacently before the street, eager to be remembered, eager to forget? . . . Home again, we smile, relieved: Your feet are clean, your steps may stop. The world has not touched you. 3. You saw it all, the dive on fifty-second street your window. Freud probed the mind, you probed the heart and found dirt within your own. . . . This is how it always is. The soul has countries where no ships can go. . . . Confucius says: the surface matters. Surfaces sometimes absorb but the gloss always reflects. . . . Inconstant, we wander. There are landscapes in your eyes which I would long to see. . . . It did not surprise you: you saw brothers whose hearts were mirrors; They saw no other eyes. . . . What then? Does the young man lounge with pride? Does the sun reveal our splendour? No sun today; splendour then must hide. . . . The Devil’s soothing voice, contextualised, conceals the fact that he hates the lot of us. 4. Pigeons coo because they can; the town-square is their friend. Where, stranger, is your home? . . . Civilisation stands where you left it: monuments to physics and and past’s worst indiscretions. . . . If goodness is forever, then perhaps you might explain the death of goodness in my mind. . . . Silence. Your footsteps deny the road. Pianos pirouette in time but your ears are a vacuum. . . . Statistics lie; the Devil is a determinist but Christ hung on a tree. . . . Although His Image, I betray the breath in me. Forgive, forgive. Wrath, pass me by. . . . The law is hidden in the gaze which says, Thou shalt not kill. I will arise and see.
Faith and Sight
I.
“Am I okay?” the question asks itself.
The mind retreats within to make reply
And eyes forever dart towards the shelf
(The cupboard open, fruit left out to dry).
Unsettled souls put back the oil of joy
And rifle through supplies to find the seed.
The memory bank’s a plastic, moulding joy,
Responsive to the anxious way we knead,
New lies put in for truth, new fears for peace.
For we transform the past each time we check,
And, moulding former years, these years can’t cease.
There’ll always be new jokers in the deck,
New ways to stop ourselves from singing praise
And counting blessings in these blessed days.
II.
The lies I tell myself are always true;
I make them true with every strained belief,
Confirming in myself the self I rue
And batter in my mind without relief.
The other possibility is faint;
It’s scarred by life, by nails, by Cross’s shame.
I take white surfaces and then I paint
Dark colours which I call by my own name.
The patterns which I paint declare in me
The ridges and the grooves; the light I leave
For other selves. I paint the worst in me.
Tomorrow I will see what I believe:
Far safer for today to say the worst
Than trust the best and end up still accursed.
III.
The leap required steps out into thin air,
For air is all I see, and yet I know –
Know what? what’s known? – the promises are there
Yet soft like wind and silent like the snow.
The space of possibility is vast
And frightens as it welcomes and gives flight;
It echoes with the failures of the past
And glares with futures, blank for being bright.
Determinism sings a well-known strain,
The soundtrack of tomorrow’s yesterday.
If I should leap or if I should refrain
Is something which my history dare not say.
The answer lies in scars which, scarred for me,
Give rise to feet and lift me in their plea.
IV.
Lift feet and jump: the air is thick with grace;
The ground caves in the longer that you stand.
The chasm opens more the more you pace,
Yet time and space are pebbles in His hand.
No terra firma stands beneath your soles,
For land is weakest when it’s built on fear
And while you wait these fast-expanding holes
Make nothing of the truth that now appears.
So live: eternity is wide and welcoming,
And give: give all; the best you’ll give is loss
And glory’s weight outweighs the loss you bring.
When truth burns bright, it will burn out the dross
And emptiness will fill with very Light,
More deep than grave, more radiant than sight.
Inhumane Traffic
It’s strange the impact that these moments have
As, silently congealing in our cars,
We feel somehow abject, dehumanised,
And in that moment that is what we are:
Mute and seething that we couldn’t save
Time on roads much worse than realised.
Still, this is not as bad as it could be:
Our tyres are safe; the traffic soon will clear;
No car bombs wait for us to turn the keys.
But think: we’ve wasted hours, we’ve wasted years…
I’d like to blame my friend who said to go
This way, but I’ll admit that I got lost.
The urge to fume does not offset the cost –
And so I’ll take the blame for this one, Joe.
Sonnet
Do not mistake the fold for where we live: It overlaps the outside and the in, Suturing together, and it binds What otherwise would float and duck and dive In nexus-waves of incompleteness. Yes: It’s true that we are nothing if our minds Are not caught up in Being’s dance. The less We live to others, then the less we live. Still, there’s an Other who directs the dance: He holds it, total, in its flux and flow; It moves and waves and changes ever more. The being that is truest and most sure Yet many-pleated – life par excellence – Dwells in the folds of His eternal now.
Indecisive Spring (After W.H. Auden’s “Under Sirius”)
One of Auden’s more challenging but also most remarkable poems is “Under Sirius”, written as a response to medieval Latin poet Fortunatus who, by Auden’s account, longed for humanity to experience some sort of tragedy to shake them to their senses. Auden’s inspiration came from the time known as the “dog days”, associated with the star Sirius, in which long, languid and hot days seemed to Auden’s Fortunatus to be symptoms of the inner death of humanity. If you are living in Melbourne, you may be better able to relate to a season which can’t make up its mind, which shifts from spring to autumn to winter and back to spring again, all in the space of a few days. So I have used this Melburnian weather pattern as the starting point for my poem.
Indecisive Spring (After W.H. Auden’s “Under Sirius”)
Would your hope make sense
If today were that moment of silence,
Before it break and drown…?
(W.H. Auden, “Under Sirius”)
Now, of course, we wend our way through changing days:
The sun peers sometimes out of wind
And rain and autumn cling to spring’s façade.
Sun-bakers in Apollo-worship find
Their hopes flit and dance extempore around;
Listen, listen, the silent sound
Of spring weaves in with leaves falling,
Disappointment swept up in langour
And our summer dreams ever calling.
If this is that moment of silence, it hangs between
The dog star and our torpid sun:
A quiet emptiness, a vacuum, saying, revealing nothing.
Days pass and fade, not yet begun,
And, sagging into wounded land and sea,
The Fisher King bleeds his ancient reverie;
Thunder mutters petulant
And you, Fortunatus, shake your head
At clouds both wise and arrogant.
Indecision creeps to the table; the meal eats itself;
Still the family sings and curtains sway
Into the sun long, long ago set.
And should we forget, in our vaporous way,
Who we are and what we should be,
The seasons too may fail to see
That all things wend their changing course
Yet lead soon back to always-here.
Will you, then, be watching as
The truths behind the languor finally appear?
Your answer dangles limp in the clouds,
No reason for these rhyme-and-riddle seasons.
Never fear: should spring slip into winter now,
Nonetheless the sun commits no treason.
Our orbit weaves elliptical as it’s always done
And time will know for sure what we’ve become:
Children who forgot to thank the hands
That shaped our dust and gave it lips
And made our ever-circling souls to stand.
Tethered
Last night I saw the new film “Gravity” at the cinema. If you have not seen it yet, I will not spoil the movie for you. Let me just say that it was one of the most powerful and visceral films I have seen in a long time. Coming home last night and reading Psalm 141 before bed, I found the two blurring together to form this poem – a reflection on what it means to be simultaneously bound and free.
Tethered Bound by scheming foes within, vacuums drawing from without, the suck of space, the pains of time, the memories of empty days, entangled in these ropes and wild debris flying at my feet, the looming threat of drifting free, no foothold and so sight: hold me; space is vast and I am lost if I’m not found in You; but I will fly tethered and free if I fly bound to You.
The Consolations of Writing 