[Of all the poems issued on this blog and elsewhere, I have the least understanding of its original impulse.. It has something to do with impressions of places and people experienced while living in France years ago. In that sense it was always around; but I finally put things together because an overseas radio programme which invites poetry but accepts nothing already published, even on the Net, wanted complete novelty.
So I made an effort to oblige. But from long experience I know that, sadly ,media can’t be trusted to be reliable or helpful. After hearing nothing from the given address, on inquiring I was improbably told nothing had been received; however I could apply again to a certain person but it might take up to six months for a decision. Which seems about right as I re-applied and have never heard again. Not so much as a line of acknowledgment. So I shall “publish” here on the net… which disqualifies me from being broadcast. The literary scene or those who manage it remain as tiresome and tortoise slow as they ever were across the centuries. …..Perhaps I should write a poem in the style of Juvenal warning against the folly of writing poetry for anyone or anything today?!].
1793: THOUGHTS BEFORE THE GUILLOTINE
Crisp as fresh bread day dawned
The air was still as marble steps, the sky
Serene as female faces calmed –
Such mild and quiet harbingers of good you’d say.
But now past noon there’s just this noise
The crowds, the faces I refuse to see,
The narrow streets, the high and dusty
Tenements, their shadows pressing down
Towards our destination in a wider space
Beneath a harsher light where all is seen.
Till then across worn cobbles
On and on wheels grate and tumbrils lurch
Behind slow beasts born strangers to
The grace and speed of race and hunt.
Shut quickly as a fan our hunting parties
Like the dance were gone with all
Our private pleasures and affairs.
I’m all that I have been and done
This self which half evaporates amid
What’s so immediate, so material.
Yet what’s mundane may still conceal
Some mystery a shade sublime
When like a ritual it repeats. How strange
The cock crows all days good and ill,
And sun shines down on war and peace!
Small doubt it’s Nature is supreme
Although it posts no messages of hope
Nor tells of life beyond our end.
But who’s to say, who even could,
What is our purpose and the Truth?
Philosophies of God or gods or none
Are quests in vain unless perhaps
The atoms re-engage in much the way
Lucretius thought they formed at first.
Yes, Nature is the Absolute and beneath
Its sway there’s always inequality and rank
Such as with pride I rightly show
And such as some will always own.
There’s continuity of sorts in that
As in the dialogue of selves. The mind runs on
To insist “I am”, the reason why perhaps
Mad legend tells how on the stream
A poet’s severed head still spoke and sang.
For when it seems there is no more to say
There always is; there’s always will.
Show well I must, defy all Hades that is dark…
Towards the fated square wheels grate
And tumbrils lurch. Breathe deep, dream
Summer skies, be calm. Release.
Readers can find other poems of mine on this site and in the books Puer Poems, New Poems and Two Celtic Dramas and Raphael and Lucifer and other Visionary Poems all available from Amazon and the Book Depository. Still other poems if more occasional can be found at the less used, McCleary’s Additions, blog https://mcclearysadditions.wordpress.com/
McCleary's Alternatives 