Rail against the night, the day,
Whatever blue the sky is
Above your heart that thunders:
A cloud gone beyond grey
To colour, filtered pigmentation,
Like blood beneath skin.
We choose not to see
How far light has come
To meet us here.
This is the fading moment,
When all the things that drift from heaven
Come to us as dust
Specks on the remaining wind
Grace, salvation, the blessings
Of some imagined God
Eroded by distance or time,
All but invisible in our eyes.
There is nothing left to bruise your anger on.
In the backlit halo
Of your disappointment,
In memory or misunderstanding,
The descending starshine
Shaved an atom’s width
Of paradise to lay it
Unrecognisable at your feet.
This is what years become,
What hope amounts to:
Falsehood projected on naked tomorrow,
Heaven, not as we divine it,
But heartless and indifferent.
There is nothing left when everything is put away,
When we remember the places built to conceal
The things we could not bear.
By our hands we understand,
With them, we sign and shape,
Frame distance in the grid of our fingers
And the labouring of our hearts.
Here and now, and not hereafter,
Time and space are structured.
Should we dare to act in them,
We reinvent tomorrow,
Reconstruct from so much dust
Paradise from its scattered pieces.
There is nothing else.
I heard Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales, on Desert Island Disks today. There was a brief comment on writing poems starting with a title. She does this apparently but it may not be entirely poetically normal.
This one of mine came that way. I have an alphabet of them in my Initialising cycle, started in 1996, where each line is a word in an acrostic sequence. I'm half way through having begun in 1996. Time I got it finished, eh?
Check the cycle here: http://writer.filmdesign.org.uk/bh/initialising.html This poem is here.
To colour, filtered pigmentation,
Like blood beneath skin.
We choose not to see
How far light has come
To meet us here.
This is the fading moment,
When all the things that drift from heaven
Come to us as dust
Specks on the remaining wind
Grace, salvation, the blessings
Of some imagined God
Eroded by distance or time,
All but invisible in our eyes.
There is nothing left to bruise your anger on.
In the backlit halo
Of your disappointment,
In memory or misunderstanding,
The descending starshine
Shaved an atom’s width
Of paradise to lay it
Unrecognisable at your feet.
This is what years become,
What hope amounts to:
Falsehood projected on naked tomorrow,
Heaven, not as we divine it,
But heartless and indifferent.
There is nothing left when everything is put away,
When we remember the places built to conceal
The things we could not bear.
By our hands we understand,
With them, we sign and shape,
Frame distance in the grid of our fingers
And the labouring of our hearts.
Here and now, and not hereafter,
Time and space are structured.
Should we dare to act in them,
We reinvent tomorrow,
Reconstruct from so much dust
Paradise from its scattered pieces.
There is nothing else.
© BH 2013
I heard Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales, on Desert Island Disks today. There was a brief comment on writing poems starting with a title. She does this apparently but it may not be entirely poetically normal.
This one of mine came that way. I have an alphabet of them in my Initialising cycle, started in 1996, where each line is a word in an acrostic sequence. I'm half way through having begun in 1996. Time I got it finished, eh?
Check the cycle here: http://writer.filmdesign.org.uk/bh/initialising.html This poem is here.
