It is the lightness of a hawk
That dresses the wind,
The tracings found
In crushed elegies of frost.
It is the shade that disappears
Into summer’s resinous hum,
The sigh contained in all rapt silences,
The shudder in the belly of a rose.
Author: Grant Fraser
Magpie Dusk
By day, he is slow in his practised promenade,
A plump courtier
Three paces behind his imagined king,
Scanning his small estate
With morsel eyes.
Startle him
And he will run
Like a fat boy at a school picnic.
But as day sets,
In the rests between his song of melodious dusk,
Unspoken things may stir
In the rounds of our own melancholies.
Moscow Bells
All regimes have their confiscations,
Thus by edict thy made them dumb:
Shudder children, and do not dream their names,
Mandelstam who grovelled for names,
Ahkmatova and Pasternak who crept their poetry
Past factories where lists were spun,
Past foremen fat with budgets of lies,
Through queues of relatives who came with stooped hearts
To whisper their litanies of names,
Past the basilica of small consolation.
In the wintered sabbath the Russian world held still;
Hoar-frost crackled on the seeming weight of bells.
A morning at La Place des Vosges
In the garden of the great Square
the sun has been called to duty,
and the lime trees dress
to their cool attention,
their shade in meticulous ranks;
a fuss of pigeons in the leaves
whinges a gallic monotony.
Of Gallipoli
A poem for Agnes Bojaxhiu
Recently published letters have revealed that although Mother Teresa of Calcutta spent many years in her inspiring ministry, she felt, during much of that time, a profound spiritual emptiness.
At each day’s end
You shawled the night about you
Gathering in the cold,
And rehearsed again
Your most private agonies,
As if your turn of phrase
Might stir a holy grammar, Might persuade the silence to speak.
But by day,
With the sureness of one who might attend upon a prince
You washed the disgrace from their bodies,
Eked out from them the blessing of their names,
And restored life
To those whose lives were ending.
A poem for Catherine Hamlin
Catherine Hamlin, an Australian Doctor, established a hospital in Ethiopia in 1974 with her late husband to treat women who had been damaged by the complications of childbirth. Because of their wretched injuries these women were commonly cut- off from their families and communities, often permanently.So far the hospital has successfully performed fistula repair surgery on more than 34,000 women.
She might have traced the sweetness of her child,
Raised him up,
Felt the weight of his infancy comply to her breast,
But the thorns of Africa drive deep:
In the groaning travail of birth she was cruelled,
In the joy of yielding to life she was abandoned
And curled in an atrophy of shame,
Was soured,
Became untouchable.
Rembrandt Van Rijn
On certain nights the ghost of Rembrandt Van Rijn
walks the galleries where his masterworks are kept.
Rembrandt’s ghost
Heavy for a ghost, he rouses himself again
To trawl the galleries of his dead successes.
Although he is spruced with a garland of rosemary,
His winding sheet still reeks of mortality and paint,
And he still keeps a weather- eye
For the shades of old creditors,
For, dogged interminably by life’s misfortunes,
Rembrandt Van Rijn died beyond his means.
Rembrandts Ghost – with music
Sinead
Some years ago, Sinead and her friend Nikola were preparing to go out for the evening. A young man, unknown to either of them,
entered Nikola’s home and proceeded to stab both girls relentlessly. Sinead eventually fell to the floor with a knife wedged in her arm. Nikola fled upstairs, but the man followed and stabbed her in the heart. Sinead heard him leave and managed to drag herself upstairs to cradle her friend in her arms in the last moments of her life.
Still the days lunge at her
Wielding all the ferocity of that stricken day,
But, of Sinead, my mind goes
To the gravity of her hesitations
As she climbed that tortured stair,
And to how she knelt to her friend-
The strident fears still screaming in her brain-
And kneeling, cradled her friend to her death.
From within the terror,
In utter determination,
She raised from out of savagery.