On One of The Blessings of Occasional Double Vision

An autumn morning,
Brilliant after rain,
The long grey skies
Restored to blue again,
A flock of geese appearing from the left
Flies in Prussian style formation.
But in retreat,
Across the fields of mud and mire
And blurred fields of vision as I tire,
And in the pastel air and rising higher,
Become a stunning, crowd, a congregation:
Diplopia, migraine made
Turns little flock,
To mystical, synchronized murmuration.

On Reading Reports of the Recent Floods

I did not know that you were my true love,

Until I glimpsed you, unexpectedly,

And felt my heart beat speeding, as my breath

Was put on pause and I compared

The printed image of your pastel sky,

With that beyond, around, above. 

I saw your light, which changes imperceptibly,

Held captive on the page and as I stared

Recalled the decades of its loveliness gone by

Which bound me to you, likely unto death.

And yet you only featured here, in your beauty

Because you’d acted badly by my fellows,

Had acted in accordance with your nature,

In wild abandon of your regulated duty

And filled yourself with calm and glassy water,

To make a mirror for your pale washed heaven,

To place it on your surfaces in patches,

Reflecting autumn’s buffs and golden yellows.

Heavenly Blue

I long for paraffin, coloured blue

I hold it up in imagination

Comparing Mary’s gown,

The sky, the cut-up velvet curtain,

Finding them all wanting

In my obsessive concentration

On the shade, of which I’m certain.

I don’t need the heat from the stove,

Or the rival shades of the flame,

Too much like Calor gas,

Though pale,

The row of triangular teeth 

Dancing, not guttering, 

On the wick underneath.

Do I need the fumes too,

Some strong scent to inhale?

Or is it just the look I should remember, 

Of loveliness in a five gallon can

Off white, translucent plastic?

Just something about the liquid hue

Against yellow chestnut leaves and larch

And piles of orange-copper beech

That feels like Heaven,

Childhood essence of November.

A Plea

Please don’t nail my testicles to the table,

It’s’s a valuable table and I prize it.

It’s rosewood, 1820 , deep red brown with grain of sable,

And it’s English too, so please do not despise it.

Of course the Regent did admire the Napoleonic style,

So it has a graceful French look about it,

And of course you know, I too, am a mad keen Francophile,

It’s not my balls I care about, don’t doubt it. 

Inspired by this section of an article in The Spectator by Rory Sutherland:

Remainers have almost exclusively made their case on economic grounds, yet in a manner far more fanatical than the businesses they claim to defend. One of the strangest aspects of the Brexit debate is how readily people on the left adopt neo-liberal beliefs about free trade when it supports their emotional predisposition. This may explain why such people have won so few converts; after all, it doesn’t sound convincing to hear leftists suddenly profess passionate concern for global supply-chains. Theirs is an emotional fear disguised as an economic argument; a bit like saying: ‘Please don’t nail my testicles to the table, it’s a very valuable table.’

You can’t help but think: ‘That isn’t your real reason, is it? 

“The Haste of the Fool is the Slowest Thing in the World. “

The slowest thing in the world is the haste of the fool,

Who seeks to undermine that which over years

Has been held fast, because it is a good.

He rushes through his Bills and seeks to rule

A people whom he holds in deep contempt,

And cannot bear the fact he shares their race,

Dispensing with their wishes in distaste

He makes them criminal by passing acts.

Because he is a fool he moves in haste

And sees the nation through his weak, myopic lenses

A poor, distorted, wishy washy place

Where principle and moral have no force,

Revealing he has nothing understood

And ultimately cannot stay the course.

And other fools, whipped up into like frenzies,

Craving power in their ignorant greed,

Champion his folly as they school

Their minds in shallow, thin and meaningless ideas,

Believing they are radical, in contradiction

To the definition of the word, for who needs facts?

That which Orwell had predicted but thought fiction

Has come about through this crazèd, foolish speed

This ‘rational’, ‘liberal’ shallow intervention

Has sought to lay a once great nation waste. 

But a fool’s haste is the slowest thing there is

And a country knows its stories and its fate

And writes its history in terms of people,

And fools, by definition, learn too late

Their folly, viz:

Movements borne of popular dissent

Are never crushed by those who legislate. 

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All arseholes and eyeballs, and beyond belief.

Lady Chapel, Ely Cathedral.

There’s no purifying fire, though it’s source, the sun

blazes, somewhere, out of sight,

just purifying light.

The blue above the Fens, Prussian, lapis lazuli, azure,

scattered in the atmosphere, 

contrasting with the grey-gold-white

of limestone lamella, hymenophore,

pours through plain panes, making things clear.

The stone crowd, once gathered in niches, is no more.

There’s only Modern Mary, plump in pleated  gown,

as if months have passed since she conceived,

arms raised to Heaven, eyes down.

And only a few living souls stand, stunned,

gazing in awe,

struck, not by stained, chromatic decoration,

but by destruction, desecration, 

which yet seems cure,

a counterintuitive restoration,

not just of faith in God,

but in the superior skills and determination, 

of men who believed,

though so much of what they achieved

is no longer there.

Now there is only clarity
what is left, laid bare,

peace, calm

flooding through each warped, transparent plane,
creating here and there a lens,

Magnificat Dominum

pouring through

this ‘Ship of the Fens’
this miracle of the warp-land plain,

this place, whose space was ever pure,

so that we’re bathed by balm 

the grace that spills across each embrasure.

After Reading an Article in the Middle of the Night About Dr Seuss, and how to Pronounce His Name.

It is too late, it is no use,

I keep on saying Dr Seuss,

I read your words and hear my voice

And find I simply have no choice,

However much I wish to say

His name the proper German way,

My silly brain will not refrain

From mispronouncing it again. 

It is too late

I have no choice

I simply can’t say Dr Seuss. 

Paving Over the Cow Paths

Meandering at random in pursuit

Of more of what was sought before and loved,

Does not seem a bad way to make a route.

But fixing these in stone is plainly mad

And a pointless contradiction in terms.

And yet I don’t rejoice, I don’t feel glad,

When cogitating the alternative,

Because I know that those who’d 'pave the way'

And lead their followers to  pastures new,

Are prone to lead the gullible astray.

And worse than a tarred cow path is a road

Paved with good intentions, ill thought through.

Bells on Sunday

The ringing isle, that Handel named

still rings, despite the lack of faith,

of those who dwell within the bounds

of steeple and sky piercing spires.  

They hear,

above the daily grind, 

despite white headphones in each ear,

and dreary ‘music’ banging.

And when the peals are rightly famed

for purity of dinging sounds

and clarity of singing chimes, 

they feel, quite rightly, that they own

this tintinnabulation tone,

this lovely clinging clanging.

Bonging, tenor rhymes

re echo

from marvellous medieval towers

on and on and on they go,

inside the mind

and give the sense this noise is ours.

And how much greater pride we feel,

when ‘our’ bells’ seem to appeal

to those who choose which shall appear

on Sunday morning radio.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08fdfm6

People Who Seemed Like Good Blokes Are Actually Just Tossers.

People who seemed like really good chaps

are actually just arseholes,

disappointing in so many ways.

Those who seemed really decent

have morphed into utter twats, in recent days,

they have cast themselves in a new light,

some are actually deranged.

I’m not sure why, self serving prats

ever gave me the impression they were good souls,

when they were just tossers.  Perhaps

I have been blessed with new vision,

clarity of thought, insight,

but on the whole, I don’t think it’s me who’s changed

Aga

Like Gustav Holst, you’re Swedish by descent

and yet, so English that the ‘Q’ word’s used,

you’ve come to symbolise a deep content,

you’re warm and homely, yet we are confused,

since running you requires such quantities

of cash, our love can lead us to resent

your needs.  

Like many Swedes you’re typically blonde,

and like a Viking, often battle scarred,

you’re one of us, and so we’ve grown quite fond

of droning on about your faults, you’re tarred

and grimed with built up carbon, and you’re aged

with freckles, speckled brown.   You don’t respond.

You stay as silent as a got-at spouse,

and do your job as you see fit and persevere.

You are the central figure in the country house,

imperfect, comforting, you draw us near,

and yet you’re not entirely dependable,

and using you requires a certain nous.

On Patriotism in the Army (Battle of Danny Boy)

As skidding to a halt, returning fire

from in the turret, we men in the back

sat listening to the endless rounds, spray up,

the language in our minds was vile, obscene

for we’d been sent to counter the attack.

About fifteen militia, maybe ten,

popped up, engaged, got down, all zig zag hid

entrenched in desert sand, not in the mire

of some historic gas polluted scene.

We followed orders, no time to weigh up,

we fought as British men have done, we did

what we set out to do, which you’d admire

if we were not your fellow countrymen.

We zig zagged, leap frogged our positions then

went down upon one knee, returned the blast,

and step by step we closed in on the trench

and some surrendered, threw down guns, at last.

We  saw the shocked expressions in the eyes
of those who had not thought we’d take the fight

to them, and sensing quick defeat some ran,

yet where they’d run we could not really tell.

Almost as great as theirs was our surprise

at making it this far, yet we began

to follow training, not our instincts, which

were blind, defeatist, unreliable,

we did what we’d been trained to know was right.

The trench contained the living and the dead,

and weapons, which we put beyond the use

of men like cornered animals, whose dread

of us, to ours of them, was parallel.

As gun fire, covering, rained overhead,

confusion reigned and fear deep within,

we soldiered on and thought it not obtuse,

for something kept us at our work, despite

the chemical of doubt, adrenaline,

whose reasoning seemed undeniable, 
pumped through our heat raised veins, demanding flight.

As more troops on the battlefield arrived

for safety we had need to clear the site.

I walked out at the Sergeant Major’s side,

and far about the scene we tried to scan,

while sensing sudden danger all around

then “target left, militia in a ditch.”

The Sergeant Major quickly took him down,

a job of work, completion of a plan,

how many lives were saved for one deprived?

And we moved on, until ten yards away

another fighter stood, and so I dropped,

and kneeling, shot him, life denied.

“In all my dreams before my helpless sight”

in many hours of my waking day
I hear him coughing, taking his last gasp

and see him crumpling to the desert ground,

and wonder if your sort will ever grasp,
or even begin to acknowledge,

the weird kind of courage,
that it takes to kill a man.

And afterwards we took each corpse back where

the former man could be identified,

a dreadful, and a most horrific task,

and almost an impossibility,

but one from which we could not be exempt,

their death was our responsibility.

Their blood, soaked puce, into the desert sand

might have been mine, my life ended there.

“If in some smothering dreams” you too could see,

in detailed scenes within your poor mind’s eye

the vehicles we laid them in, with care, 

holding them intact, would you still ask

that bravery be held beneath contempt,

or will you only sneer at ‘the old lie?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6685071/Hero-won-Military-Cross-bravery-Iraq-years-later-smeared-war-criminal.html

On a Quote from Leibniz 

‘Music is a hidden arithmetic exercise of the soul, which does not know that it is counting.’

Arithmetic might please my soul,

although it seems, that on the whole,

my spirit, cannot calculate.

Instead it seems to concentrate

upon the sweet melodic role,

to keep the beat is not its goal,

I’ve never known it to extoll

arithmetic.

Yet melody requires control,

harmonic rhythm fills the hole,

one hears the chords elucidate

so, is the way they resonate

arithmetic?