POEM: POEMS FOR FORGOTTEN DAYS

 

 

SWEET JOHN (SPENCER’S HILL)

Sweet John! Sweet John!

How long you’ve been away!

I’ve been away too long,

but I’m back here to stay.

Sweet John! Sweet John!

Why did you go away?

I left for my sweetheart,

to marry her someday.

Sweet John! Sweet John!

Pray tell me who is she?

She’s just the sweetest gal

the world will ever see!

Is she a farming lass

or from a city lane?

She lives not far from here,

but I’ll not say her name.

Sweet John! Sweet John!

Where did your trav’ling go?

I went up to the mines

of north Ontar-i-o.

Sweet John! Sweet John!

Why did you go up there?

To make me some money

to give to one so fair.

Sweet John! Sweet John!

Pray, did you search in vain?

I dug up far more gold

than a cloud does give rain!

Sweet John! Sweet John!

My blessings go with you!

Say with all your money

what is it you will do.

I’ll buy that house that sits so high,

the one ‘top Spencer’s Hill.

Then I’ll buy his foundry

and Samuel Johnson’s mill.

I’ll fix up that old place.

She’ll want for not a thing.

With fine silks and linen,

and golden wedding rings!

Sweet John! Sweet John!

I, too, will wed this fall!

Tell me now of your love.

Where did you meet and all?

We’d meet on Spencer’s Hill.

when I, a callow youth.

We would love until dawn.

She is my life, in truth.

Sweet John! Sweet John!

What do you now speak of?

Not those times, long ago,

when we were fools in love?

Not foolish was our love!

Nor was our love in vain!

We were in love, and still are.

It is a fact that’s plain.

Sweet John! Sweet John!

Yes, once we were as one.

But like night ends the day,

our love has had its run.

Sweet John! Sweet John!

I’m ‘trothed to Adam Dane.

It’s him I love. Only him.

And soon I’ll take his name.

“Sweet John! Sweet John!”

In love you once called me.

Soon we’ll dance, one last time,

beneath our courting tree.

 

VAMPIRE PRAYER

Desolate Beauty! Few eyes see

how the orphaned red glow

at sunset becomes you.

We deniers of day,

cling to slivers of light:

A waning moon,

the knife-edge shimmering

of waves at dusk,

the sparkling shapes of constellations

spinning in your Great Round.

We whose depth of purpose

begrudges not your sanctions.

We see wisdom in your absence.

Truth comes in afterglow.

Your law comes with dawn

and the searing rays

of the sun’s terrible majesty.

 

Wondrous Beauty!

Too much is made of day

by those who live there.

Too little is made of night

by those who dream here.

We are your secret lovers.

We pray for the end, 

when cities crumble

and skies fall, 

when mountains shake,

and stars wink out of existence!

We pray for Darkness to cover all

and for those who live by day

to at last understand

your dark message.

Amen.

THE QUICK RED FOX

Morning. White line horizon.

Dark clouds hold down a sky

marbled purple and grey,

with webs of distant lightning

that come unannounced by sound.

Rain breaks icy and wet across fields

stirred by a western wind.

“Lightning don’t come much

this time of year,” he says.

Out past the escarpment, he means.

“It’s too cold. Winds blow southern, mostly.”

 

Once, as a boy, I was walking through a field

knee-deep with snow. Each step I took

my boots broke through crust

that squealed and cracked

like sheets of Styrofoam.

I was half-way across when lightning struck,

hitting a tree in the next field.

It was the only time

I’d seen it so late in the year.

And the only time so close.

 

Against a grey-crusted snowbank,

a rusty-red blur on the field’s edge.

I know the fox is watching us.

“Mother,” he says. “Snared one of her pups

the other day. Den’s back in the scrub.”

I walk the mucky, half-frozen field with the man.

Silent lightning in the distant sky, our foreground.

Our boots squish and pop through muddy furrows

like an army marching to the sea.

The fox moves behind briar and is gone.

We reach the field edge, surveying, deciding things,

making timetables, parsing out the months and years,

gauging and recording the shapes and dips of the land.

We’re lost for a time. Then thunder growls,

and we look up at the closing storm.

“Best get back. I got a thermos of coffee

in the truck.”

…..

The rain is heavier now,

pocking the wet snow with tiny craters.

Mud splashes up from the thawing ground,

dirtying its coat.

 

LIFE CYCLE

Even now, after all these years:

in the earth of an upturned

basement floor;

in a faded summer dress

hanging in an upstairs closet;

in clumps of loamy soil

and amended spring leavings

at the bottom of our garden;

in the rich mud at the creek’s mouth

where I part late-season reeds

to gather crayfish to show my son;

 

and in skull-sized balls of clay

wrapped in wet dishrags 

and bagged in plastic,

set aside 

until I’m ready for them.

…..

That heated discovery

of scent’s moment,

in sweat and comfort, 

comes full circle

in the press and release 

of clay on the wheel,

as it turns and shapes

in the potter's dance,

then dries brittle as bone.

And in the end, 

glazing’s syrup will add 

but a passing savour

to one that’s been there 

all along.

 

IN THE GARDEN

In the time it takes

to drink that pot of tea,

a woman with coiled black hair 

and bright teeth 

fills her basket

with gently picked leaves,

leaving serpents free

for other duties.

 

SOULS IN A DIFFICULT

TRANSITION

THERE! There it is!

Over there! Go there.

Go to the light. THE LIGHT!

Stop! Hold on.

That’s not it.

That’s not the light.

Don’t go there!

Hey look!

Over there. There!

Go to the other light!

THE OTHER LIGHT!

 

WIND CHIMES

IN THE ENTRYWAY

they announce 

without prejudice

and sound softly 

as a Buddha smiles. 

 

 

INDEED, these are poems for forgotten days! Some oldies, a newbie or two. File them or forget them. Their use is in the making and baking—byword buns hot from the oven and set out on the counter for a nibble or nosh.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE, how’s that war in Ukraine going? On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give it maybe a four at this point. What I really want is some H-bombs in the mix. For starters, maybe they could incinerate a pig farm with a tactical nuke. Mmmm! Bacon! In the meantime, we'll have to make do with only occasional bouts of death and destruction on our screens, what with muddy roads slowing everybody down. (Hope for winter when the tanks start rolling again.) Instead, we read how the latest round of sanctions (#8) will bring Russia to its knees. What a yawn!

Concerning sanctions, as I wrote the other week, they work (sort of) only when you try and impose them on a small-fry country like Grenada or Haiti. When you try this form of coercion on a country the size of Russia, with the resources it can muster, well, it’s a bit like playing a video game when you start running over as many people as you can in your virtual car, only to find you’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest and the game’s response to your foolhardiness is to send more and more cop cars after you until your copped into submission. In other words, sanctions tend to BACKFIRE, as they have so spectacularly in Europe. Ain't blowback a bitch!

TO SAY Europeans have shot themselves in the foot is putting it mildly. They’ve put the shotgun under their collective chin and pulled the trigger! And now, there’s this mysterious sabotage of the Nord Stream undersea gas pipelines. Who knows who’s responsible for pinching off permanently any chance of renewing Russian gas flows. One sage commentator says use the Latin cui bono (“to whom is it a benefit”) to help identify the culprits. Follow the money, dear readers! Heck, it’s the United States, isn’t it? Well, whoever is responsible, it’s very James Bond of them. And it keeps twitter feeds positively incendiary with gossip and innuendo!

 

BUT MORE AND MORE EUROPEANS are becoming concerned that their governments have lost their collective nut and are consigning their populations to a very cold winter.

HOWEVER, we are told that fight on we must! Apparently, we must fight the good fight until the last Ukrainian is dead, and (legitimate) Russian security concerns be damned! Cummon in! Join NATO, Finland and Sweden, the water’s fine and  getting warmer by the minute!

 

WELL, that's enough satire for today. The joke’s on us. This is the world we’ve made and the times we live in, and I think there’s a sea change coming, though most of us are unprepared even to get our pinkies wet.

THE QUALITY OF PUBLIC DISCOURSE—the crassness and bickering, the lack of genuine engagement, denying the need for give and take, for compromise, the dreadful instincts and shortsightedness of our political leaders, the deadly influence of the military/industrial complex, suggest to me—if not a falling off the cliff—then at least a major step downward is in the cards for us. And deservedly so. Things change slowly then all at once. Be prepared.

 

Cheers, Jake.

 

The Devil in the Belfry*

 

 *Illustration from a short story by Edgar Allan Poe.

 

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