They came from the centre surrendering to heroism We retrieving their light when they no longer can
Remember a time before innocence dreamt itself
Dust on his dungarees mending a rabbit fence With Sun-kissed stains on his leathered complexion
The tableland sits down to a long afternoon’s lunch
Spinifex settling into the loam above a dingo’s bones Besides the slit-throat reeds retiring into their bushland brine
Ghost rhizomes slowly probing vegetable memories where
Scones and tea form an endless procession of domestic suns An inch-worm prophecy settling down to the bottom of
A young private’s name prefigured in a foreign constellation
Where the whistle sounds that magnesium bright moment Gun-shy generals, gazing up at the grid locked skies
Write his death warrant to be replayed on the band rotunda
Reminding us Saturday is for cricket and Sunday is for God Tongue-tied it’s enough to just listen to that music
Though we can’t surrender in dance let the band play on
…
Swings
I saw the Boy before they took him away Dressed in cap and blazer on a Sunday This time he left without his satchel
Running deeper into the city of God
Past the gates vast blackness beyond Through membrane’s vibrating shibboleths Shouts danger-mouth giving hero’s welcome
Into veins of the most high
Up-rushing in his ray-gun gothic chariot So many rooms in his father’s house Fleshy pillars in the midst of the temple
Bony knees dangle as the sky rolls
Daring centripetal motion the ground yawns Knowing entropies blind and fatal forces As a schoolboy knows well his times-tables
Well enough to know they work
Running skidoo too young for ascension time Tender gums smile their secret promises Biting the ether his pomegranates bleed
Into irresistible graces
…
Fugue-state blues
I visit you in half-way houses pubic wards or lonely squats amongst the squalor neat rows of Star-Wars figurines sit
untouched juvenilia
you my better by fathoms sensitive penetrating and nimbler with a skateboard could charm bellicose angels
five talents to my one
then the debt collector came early striking in the spiring season you giving up your treasure for an untimely exit
retracting the ladder behind
I was there when the lid fell in through your mind hole a drooling corpulence shuffles behind 15 years of antipsychotics
resignation and decline
afterwards we read this in your entrails: ‘The boy who knew to much’ yet your memory’s still sharper today recalling a distant conversation
I plagiarised from a Hare Krishna:
“Do you remember when you said, that every moment is an eternity, that can be divided infinitely, and this a chance of transcendence. It doesn’t matter what we have
been or will be but what eternally now is”
how could I refute such heresy? its irony could not elude me when time has winnowed our youth leaving behind a ward of the state
such high hopes in that come down
for what do I know of the mysteries? what, ‘eye hath not seen, nor ear heard’ of that bloody Galilean triumphant Its symbol marching beyond time
in this time before eternity
And how can I speak of this blood? sprinkled at the world’s foundation atoning for what just men stumble at and could never do
impotent to forgive themselves
what could I say of this faith? of an empty tomb in a garden a black ark flanked by angels where men are born in the dark
itself a place of decision
no longer boys with a skateboard so cannot share my recent decent nor the miracle of regeneration an eternal now has no taste or power
for recapitulating our wounds
…
In this cosmic priesthood presides
the moldering kipple the cracking alabaster
the seething foam
entropy’s child – a cold infinite expansion its countless gosh iterations recalling grim thanatos
lord of shadows
silent mementos – memento mori
that incense we raised by the setting sun
is but ashen remnant
Φῶς Ἱλαρόν
what strong hand might militate against
this ceaseless ebbing
and usher in the reign of peace its finger a symbol
points beyond
pray we a good and acceptable answer at the dreadful
and fearful judgment
that Thou blow your cool sweet breath upon us and extinguish that fierce blood which feeds imploding stars who make their final stand
on that final day
who shall never walk through the threshold terror? and gaze upon a stone of crystal-clear jasper or undergo that serial ordeal four Living Creatures and The Twenty-four Elders
an infinity of eyes in wonder and awe
then we will begin to sing and unlock this dying world from the antinomies of the uncreate Lord of Hosts – give us a word
Awakening this dead world with a song
…
© E M Healy 2013
