Hear me, God, as my heart walks to you, kneels at your clemency –
You have been three days in my house, I know not as yet
If your blessing be shed on the hearth where I would burn rich embers for you;
And all my being is a ripe carpet to your feet,
So, delicate may you tread – Answer my long desire
That each hour groweth in me more everlastingly.
I will give no name to my desire, you are master of its flames and ashes;
The winds and the seasons have made it, and nights of ravenous dream –
There is no granting of it till the answer throb in your soul’s majesty,
Let a sign be borne unto me from out your immaculate distance –
Take then from my fervour this burden of sighs, prayers and love.
The Caravans Return
The sober
Drenched morning of an October
Haunts me for a moment in the tossing uncertainties of tonight’s storm;
And I think of the wan daybreaks
That I would have postponed and now acclaim without fear,
Caring nought for the lamentable chime of their past vengeances and accusations
Ringing in the white hour of a desolate sunrise –
And at length by my own fire
I unload the delayed caravans of many years:
Though nothing is lost
Much is dulled by forgetfulness, much spoiled with tears;
Now in smooth hours that dread not the freeing of such memories
I will blow on these, that they kindle again in the warmth of the harvesting.
What If the Bell Is Loud
What if the bell is loud,
Yet call no fervents to the waiting church?
Weary of exhortations
That spring unheard, the preacher tires of faith;
In deserts secretly
The hermit wearies of his solitude.
The wave upon the rock
Beats many a day before the fissure yields.
And when desire is hot
Throbbing within the mind of a creator,
High are the ramparts still
Between it and the outer liberty.
What if a lover cry
Across the autumn glooms in lonely hour
And no voice call again,
No answer come save memory’s delicate ghost?
Pity the emptiness
That waits, and all things chilled, grown old with waiting.
Then the world mocks, asserting
Its later creeds, discoveries and lovers.
And will it comfort us,
The image of an old monk in his cell
Penning these lost endeavours
Within the volume of Eternity?
Time Alone Grapples
Wait,
Till it’s too late
To draw together the mesh of things half-forgotten?
Past fruit gone rotten,
Decayed in the dry rot of a later season’s attic;
Leaves atop of it
And dusts beneath –
God, the very breath
Of these soured love-apples;
The roundworm deals emphatic
Wounds to their resurrection, taking his fill of it.
Time alone grapples
With these vexatious questions,
Making in bonfires
His insolent purifications –
Flamboyant immortalising of our one-time most delicate desires
That have escaped all other fires.
* * * * * *
Or shall one start
Hot for certainty – leap into the dark,
Plunge in the chasm
While a cloud
Blows doubting mists around the heart?
Only in such spasm
Set out to clasp and keep
A dream that struggles back to sleep?
I hear the loud
Hurry and disorder of the drums, the bark
Of threatened dangers, the shout of haste…
My fate on the tightrope
Dances, and urges me to dance,
Nor pause, nor hope.
So always goaded recklessly I cast
Unwilling gauntlets at the feet of chance
Challenging waste.
I would have nothing die – yet all the drinking,
Courageous give-and-take of blows, and thinking,
And saying: things once gone, forever lost,
Succours me not, for all is past…
In angry host
I see the hours embark,
And the funnel of my last ship on the horizon sinking.
I Ask No Questionable Understanding
I ask no questionable understanding,
Only
A timely leisure for the disembarkation of thought
From over those cold seas that I would not have calm;
For the still oceans thicken with dumb conceit
As salt lakes petrifying, unthrilled with seasons,
Unadventurous decades
That breed
No come-and-go of days.
Let there be storms,
Elemental ravings to be tried again as before –
Memory’s uncountable crosses are set on this horizon
Wary beacons to the graze.
Let there be
New deserts raw and untenanted that thought must traverse,
Weakening,
Wistful with travellers’ fears, dismayed – obsessed
With perseverance till the last league is done.
From these trials
And the pursuing of their labyrinths
I would ask everything,
Perchance to distil
One vital hour.
These Rocked the Cradle
I think when I was born
(Under what unknown stars that keep my secret still)
The legendary fates attended me:
Dark whisperings went by
In the corridors whence I sprang,
They clung unseen
Malignantly to the new frail thing –
Chill fates, withering winds already desolating
The paths to be traversed.
Near to the grasp, out of reach, stood the fickle sword
Of crooked courage, backbiting and self-defiant –
A mist of uncertainty
Was my fond nurse, to rock me on her boundless breast;
And the outlaw,
The lurid wanderer of highroads that all children love,
He too was there – Could I have seen
I would have recognised this friend of nowadays
And said:
Clasp me, Adventure!
Seizing the vagabond
By a more kindly mood in that first hour.
All were there,
This life’s alarmers, sowing their future harvests,
Rife weeds of conflict –
all but one
That I name never, Jealousy.
An Exile
Nor fear nor hope had he, only the sigh of patience
Masking emotion; yea the very soul
Was hidden eternally, and backwards crept
The daily longings, the kindled flames of desire
That inward went, to be locked in the ardent cell.
Love moved there warily as a prisoner,
So often baffled in conflict, chill with doubting,
And martyred, fading on his dolorous cross.
He never raised hands to seize and clasp adventure;
But in the silence he would wait for life
To come with beckoning gesture, freeing him
From imposition of memory’s stealthy voices.
The wild, the hasty, and the more prodigal,
Even those that judged this nature to be deep,
Paused for a moment pondering, then with shake
Of head went saying: a sombre exile this �
��
So was there solitude around this man.
You Have Lit the Only Candle
You have lit the only candle in my heart that I am bound to worship,
Kneeling in the draughts of that cold and most solitary place,
Alone, without the stirring priests and breathless sounds of confession
That have made holy such other seclusions, and in their hour of grace
Absolved desires and sins that I am barren of. This sharp
Straight flame of yours is silent, and like a saint throws down on me,
Now I have knelt again after so long on this remembered ground,
The steadfast radiance of his mute impersonality.
You have lit the only candle that shall illumine my wayward paths;
And I tell you, before the time comes when its flames must tremble and start,
Facing some great wind of eternity that rends and masters it,
I shall be gone with the thread of its tall spirit safe against my heart.
I Think of You
In the fields
When the first fires of the nightly diamonds are lit,
When the stir of the green corn is smoothed and silent,
And the plover circling at peace like a thought in a dream,
I think of you,
Finger the last words you have added to my rosary.
On a white road
High noon and midsummer witness my love of you
Grown as a firm tree,
Rich, upright, full-hearted, generously spreading
Long shadows on the resting place of our future days.
In a town
I meet many with the thought of you in my heart,
Your smile on my lips,
I greet many
With the love that I have gathered at your fountains,
Drawn from your happy wells
In that far horizon my eyes shall ever see.
I go to the feasts adorned
In a scarlet vestment,
Bejewelled and hung with many trappings –
Under these
Burns the still flame that alone your hands may touch.
I Have Never Loved One
That Was Not Proud at Heart
Not unto him that suffers with proud head
Are given the opiates of forgetfulness.
I have never loved one that was not proud at heart,
So have we suffered in mind’s company
And yet alone, each prisoner in a cell.
The ripe, the kernel overripe still in its shell
Fruitful one day after its latent sleep,
Or barren of seed through all eternity –
It matters not, if it so fall, the tree,
Leafless, ungrown, yet broods within the ground
A little flame of its rare entity –
Fire that lives not once out in stormy winds,
Baffled and blown with passions, quenched with sorrow,
Yet burns unquenchable, at peace though mute
Below the tempests in the forest morning.
So May You Nail Your Sorrow to My Name’s Cross
That street had no horizon but the rain –
You said your heart was dying, and your life
Chilled with a frenzy that no thought might save,
And dreading your despair I would have gone,
Fled your obscure defeat –
But under the skies
That wept their clouds upon us, this heart-breaking
Might not be stilled, and in the growing night
Dead plaints came from your sorrow. Many a man
Sets hand to ploughing up of memories,
And I have trod the winter streets full oft
Heavy with reminiscence, sorry-hearted:
Yet would it profit us had I then read
Aloud the threadbare list of comfort to you?
Such is no more than wringing of faint hands
Outside the cell of prisoners condemned;
You were the gaoler to your own miseries
For whom no execution waits – Thus thinking
Silent I left you, with no words insincere
That would have chilled us with hypocrisy,
So may you nail your sorrow to my name’s cross.
I Shall Depart
There is no end to things; behold the sunset
That sails aloft unseizable and deathless,
Though I may not aspire to that swift chase.
A blind
Cold wind
Blows and is gone again
Far in the distance sighing; his errant pace
Returns in later hour. The bodies slain
In battle climb to heaven on spiritual feet,
Till the earth beckon them again
To come and go on its remembered street.
And never a song
Or thing of passionate adventure falls to dust
Spoiling and faded, when from throbbing heart
Its voice has sprung
In some once-vivid hour.
Of such is fashioned all that I demand
As eager sword to carry in my hand,
So that I fear not on time’s battlefields.
At most a little rust
Rankles on things that we no longer tend.
But I have closed my door
To those that prate of death, and shall depart
Coursing the firmaments that have no end.
At Fuenterrabia in Spain
God
Loves gold
In his churches –
On these Latin altars are found
Riches that eyes may feast; a sound
Of counted chaplets hesitates – Our cold
Dark aisles breathe other thoughts; we nod
In England, growing old,
Chagrined by Sundays, half-asleep
At the vespers that they keep
There in austerity, as if life were a penance.
I have found
Today such joy in this edge of France,
Such zest in crossing the border
By sea to Spain,
And up the alley meeting
The unknown prospect and the street that winds
Threaded with raucous laughter; the ancient order
Of priests walks here, broidered with silver crosses,
Fresh from a mass.
I saw
A giant haven of gold in a dark church,
The distant altar dominant in the night
Of noon-tide’s service –
God loves gold
At his altars brimming;
And here tradition
Burnishes the emblems of a tried religion.
I thought: God smiles
Most distantly at all the muttered prayers,
The true, the would-be fervent,
And accepts
These offerings, gathered by the one that dares
Proclaim a kinship through his priesthood’s craft –
God bends
His aureoled head indulgently;
His heart
Is filled with all the things of stress
That we have laid there, in our littleness
At grips with life, putting responsibility
Into the hands of his divinity.
Laughter and tears go to him, and the bold
Gesture of outlaws, the diverse webs we make,
(Weave to unravel later –)
Noise and silence,
The joy in power, the lonely diffidence,
All moods, all tragedies
That flame in red on our lives’ histories –
All these go by him on an echoing tide;
Waves passing and broken
They stream to the symbolic light,
Gathered about its token;
We deem it savours eternity…
Yet why should I urge my soul to infinity,
Knowing of old
Its voice must
call unanswered here? God will accept
The beggar’s sighing and the church’s gold.
Cap Du Figuier
I think of the earth sometimes
As a very great ship setting out upon the oceans;
This headland is her prow
And I today’s captain, standing at watch where two lands meet,
France and Spain, at this russet island, the full-stop before immensity.
Yet another world’s-end; behind me the continent
Gathers its mountains together in the autumn haze.
If the earth be a ship then I am time, and the wings of these white gulls
That pass from wind to wind, are the sole hours that ring in my brain,
While the timeless ocean bears all on the surge of its infinity.
To the Eiffel Tower Restaurant
Espéranto…
The seal on your letter sets me thinking
Of other days and places,
And now I have the past to kneel before my present;
Those old nights of drinking,
Furtive adventures, solitary thinking
At the corner table, sheltered from the faces,
Inopportune invasion of the street.
I feel
Sharp tugs at my memory’s sleeve:
The sound of the clock going wrong,
The fleet
Procession of your waiters with their platters –
Drinks held long
In one hand, while the other unwinds a discussion.
I do not grieve
I never grieve
For things gone by,
But all the matter
Of ten years in a childhood’s land
That grudges colour to one (save on your tables
Of opulent fruits, trimmed foods, voluminous flowers
That lie most comfortably there waiting our appetite).
I say, all the matter
Of that decade
Comes back to me with your letter.
I feel the mist
Of the room that mocks the fog in the street;
The voices of those of us returned from distant journeys,
They could ring in my ears
From your evocation;
And since from choice
I have abandoned
Those groups that pondered through the night’s perspective
Restlessly, talking of foreign towns,
I take this sustenance
From you hand only.
Think how all of France
Selected Poems Page 11
