Your Soul One Autumn Afternoon

I watched the dog as she watched you,

Watched your soul rise up and float across the autumn afternoon.

She tracked it to the door which opened just a crack,

And then she sighed, harrumphed and settled down to doze,

Aware perhaps that you’d return, quite soon, 

While all the while your body lay in some repose,

Not twitching, eyes relaxed, not rolled back.

I wish I knew the basic things dogs know

And had the confidence to feel when all is well,

Happy to observe and to keep track,

Accept that certain things are merely so.

 

A Queue

 

They waited, sadly, hour after hour,

Doing that quintessential British thing,

Putting up, in line, though tired, hungry,

Never really grumbling,

What were aching legs, stomachs rumbling,

Why give voice when greater forces curb the silly tongue,

And silence is the order of the day?

What use are words, when eyes say all there is to say?

What was drizzle, wind that blew a little cold?

When there was History, both noun and verb,

Before that place sophrosyne so lately manifested,

And there was awe that fit it’s place of old.

Milton’s final line from ‘On his blindness’

Never seemed so apt,

As rapt, they gazed with loving kindness,

To see, ironically, at rest,

An embodiment of that which he detested,

Yet changed now:

Power without power.

 

Thursday 8th September 2022 (Rondeau Redouble)

 

Would that it were not, I knew that you were dead.

Only common people speak of having ‘passed’.

It wasn’t anything the poor presenters said,

but something in the eyes of those who spoke, spoke out instead.

And listening I watched the shadow that your passing cast

unwittingly, the tension in the furrowed brows, the vast

void, the vacuum, that must be filled with words, the dread,

the meaning looks. They kept it up for hours, and I observed aghast.

Would that it were not,  I knew that you were dead.

And knew that we’d accept the stories we were fed,

Because adrift we must hold fast

to that which seems good, and go where we are led.

Only common people speak of having passed

but we are commoners, conservatives who love the past

and there must wallow when the lost, collective head

finds it cannot grasp what must be grasped.

But something in the eyes of those who spoke, spoke out instead

and cast a spanner in the spinning spokes, though did not tread

where fools go, their dance outclassed

the bitter one, clod plodding round its long made bed.

And listening I watched the shadow that your passing cast

upon a deeper one, and felt the icy blast

of winter, when daily bread

cannot be got, nor prayer that it be given sent, and one must fast

sans hope, before the table spread.

Would that it were not.