Time blew away like dandelion seed Read online

Time blew away like dandelion seed

  Copyright © 1997-2011 Thomas Thurman

  For Riordon

  Poems which are still being considered

  by journals are not included in this chapbook.

  I always appreciate criticism and feedback:

  [email protected]

  www.thomasthurman.org

  Sonnets

  Song of Easter

  When I was young I feared my growing old

  lest, being old, I should want youth again,

  or lest the growing old should cause me pain;

  I knew the worth of silver less than gold.

  I tried to hold the sun and not the moon,

  I asked the clock to stop— it paid no heed!

  Time blew away like dandelion seed,

  as sure as day, the evening came too soon.

  This road I cannot tread the other way.

  The ages passed, and age has come to me.

  Yet still asleep I dream, awake I see,

  as sure as day brings night, the night brings day,

  youth, sun and dandelion seed, and why?

  They cannot have new life unless they die.

  Song of All Souls' Day

  I saw the bindweed curl about your tomb

  Whereon I set a rose, now short of breath,

  And marked the similarity of death

  Between your chance to live, its time to bloom.

  For though your maker overflowed your hours

  Yet still upon your blossom climbed the weed;

  You noticed but did nothing; thus its seed

  Cast round the earth, and choked your budding flowers.

  But brazen trumpets round its conquering green

  This bindweed blossom, in the rose's stead;

  Just so, before you took this rosy bed

  You sometimes woke and showed what might have been.

  But now your chance is gone as chances go.

  I've learned your lesson. Let me find the hoe.

  Song of New Year's Eve

  Look to your Lord who gives you life.

  This year must end as all the years.

  You live here in the vale of tears.

  This year brought toil, the next year strife.

  For too, too soon we break our stay.

  The end of things may be a birth.

  The clouds will fade and take the earth.

  Make fast your joy on New Year's Day.

  When dies a friend we weep and mourn.

  When babes are born we drink with cheer.

  But no man mourns when dies the year.

  When dies the age, may you be born.

  Your death, your birth, are close at hand.

  In him we trust. In him we stand.

  A lamp to my feet

  I heard there was a secret metric foot

  that David knew was favoured by the Lord,

  and when he penned the psalms he'd often put

  this pattern the Almighty best adored

  amongst the endless praise and imprecations;

  unstressed, plus stressed, suffuses through his pages,

  though hidden by the English of translations;

  pentameters still echo down the ages.

  The spondee's spurned, and has been from the start;

  an anapaest's anathema, and grim.

  Though trochees may be near the Maker's heart,

  you'll never hear a dactyl in a hymn.

  There's only one the Lord thinks worth a damn:

  the sacred, the unchangeable iamb.

  Shattered

  I met a traveller from an antique land

  Who said... (I couldn't comprehend his speech;

  he spoke a tongue I didn't understand.

  It might have meant “a statue's on a beach”...

  at least, he let me see vacation snaps

  and there was quite a lot of sand about

  and one old statue, African perhaps,

  or Indian, I'm in a bit of doubt.)

  So anyway, I saw the statue's face:

  its nose was crinkled, like a lord who sniffs.

  And then there was some writing on the base;

  I couldn't read it. It was hieroglyphs.

  It all seems kind of strange, and far away,

  but must have had some meaning in its day.

  Netherlands

  If anything should happen to The Hague,

  if someday they abandon Amsterdam,

  philosophers will take these strange and vague

  descriptions, and derive each tree and tram

  by mathematical necessity:

  should nations shake their fists across the seas

  with words of war, it follows there must be

  a middle ground, a people loving peace.

  And is this scrap alone a netherland?

  Not so: we spend our nights beneath the sky,

  and every country's low for us, who stand

  a thousand miles below the lights on high;

  if only I could learn to live as such,

  and count myself as kindly as the Dutch.

  Mother of trees

  I know a tree whose apples are more sweet

  and nourishing and fair than any other:

  a person it's a privilege to meet,

  a maker, a maintainer, and a mother.

  Her branches bring delight to every day

  from each repeating month that I remember:

  we lie beneath her blossomed boughs in May

  and eat her rosy apples in September.

  Yet as she gives, she lives as more than merely

  a giving tree, that spends itself in giving:

  for still she's not consumed, though shining yearly

  with ever-fiercer fires of joyous living;

  her roots in earth, and sunlight on her brows

  and every blessèd child beneath her boughs.

  Thomas

  They named me for my granddad's father's father;

  they said he'd caught consumption in his youth

  and left his son an orphan. But the truth

  I learned on reading registers is rather

  more horrible, but easy to explain:

  his wife had died. And Thomas, left behind,

  drowned deep in pain, drank gin, and lost his mind,

  died sobbing in a home for the insane.

  And in my brain, statistic turned to story:

  a broken heart, and lovers dying young,

  beyond the brittle lies of broken lungs.

  But, grandpa, may I hope we'll meet in glory,

  and over soda, on the other side,

  I'll let you know I bear your name with pride?

  Some folk are born with knowledge of their goal

  Some folk are born with knowledge of their goal.

  I've met them, though I'm not like that myself;

  I'm wandering through life, a placid soul,

  content to leave adventures on the shelf.

  I've loved and lived without a way to know

  the field where I should strive to be the best:

  to pan for gold, or be a CEO,

  or cure disease, or conquer Everest;

  and likewise, you're a Poohstick in the stream:

  you drift through life, without an end in mind.

  We came together, neither with a dream,

  both happy with our futures undefined,

  our hoping open-ended; yet it seems

  our life together's fashioned from our dreams.

  * * *

  For and about my friend Mary Mactavish and her husband Casey.

  On being incompetent in Welsh poetry

  My Welsh is jus
t not good enough for verse.

  My dw i'n hoffi coffi's lacking fizz;

  cynghanedd is pedestrian or worse;

  I wish it wasn't so, but there it is.

  My struggle's still to learn, as yours to teach,

  and so my englyn's still in English sung,

  and aching awdls cower out of reach,

  and English shows the thinness of the tongue.

  But here's my goal: some month the Gorsedd meet

  so many miles ahead... I may be there

  to share my bitter words, my verses sweet,

  at common table. Never mind the chair.

  But that's a dream, and not what's on the card,

  and much as I might dream... for now... I'm barred.

  Margaret

  They never told about the cold, cold morn,

  the painful blue and cheery winter sky;

  the friendly warm embrace of toothy yawn,

  the reeking of its breath; its marble eye;

  the dragon gets a mention in her tale

  but just that Margaret entered its insides:

  another hero trapped inside the scales,

  but nothing of the dragon's life, besides.

  They say the beast was Satan in a glamour,

  but that's all nonsense, since the virgin matron

  who made her crucifix a makeshift hammer

  is ever since considered childbirth's patron;

  because it gave her birth, and spared her bones,

  she'd visit every week for tea and scones.

  Mary

  Her soul proclaimed the greatness of the Lord

  who dwelt within her belly, and her mind.

  The light shines on, the humble are restored,

  and food and mercy given to mankind.

  That day she saw the everlasting light

  she memorised, and treasured up inside,

  investing for the fading of her sight

  the hope that living light had never died;

  till hope itself within her arms lay dying,

  a frozen journey, ready to embark,

  and nothing more is left for her but trying

  to comprehend the greatness of the dark;

  yet somewhere shines the light, in spite of that,

  and silently she sighed magnificat.

  On first looking into an A to Z

  My talent (or my curse) is getting lost:

  my routes are recondite and esoteric.

  Perverted turns on every road I crossed

  have dogged my feet from Dover up to Berwick.

  My move to London only served to show

  what fearful feast of foolishness was mine:

  I lost my way from Tower Hill to Bow,

  and rode the wrong way round the Circle Line.

  In nameless London lanes I wandered then

  whose tales belied my tattered A to Z,

  and even now, in memory again

  I plod despairing, Barking in my head,

  still losing track of who and where I am,

  silent, upon a street in Dagenham.

  Two poems

  With mind in neutral on the train today

  I thought about a poem that I'd seen

  ten years, four thousand miles, a life away

  inside a cheap religious magazine.

  The rhymes were forced, the metre was a sham,

  the metaphors far-fetched and rather trite,

  the feeling shallow-told, yet here I am

  remembering the words again tonight.

  I wrote another poem, as a kid:

  another paper bought it for a prize.

  Ten thousand pairs of eyes saw what I did.

  I wonder if, from all those pairs of eyes,

  still, somewhere on this planet, I might find

  some reader with my poem in their mind.

  Oliver's eulogy

  It saddened me to know you from afar:

  I never heard the whimpers that you gave

  when scratched beneath the chin, or saw you save

  your mistress from a cat, or passing car;

  you never barked as I approached your door;

  you never licked my face; I never heard

  your nails on wood, or saw you chase a bird,

  and now you're gone, I cannot any more.

  You know, it makes me wonder, Oliver:

  I've usually dismissed as pious lies

  those tales of rainbow bridges in the skies

  where faithful friends will wait as once they were

  to meet us in the lands beyond the light.

  But since you've left, I find I hope they're right.

  And so I ask to share your thunderstorms

  Here as I sit and number pretty jewels,

  the colours small and shining as they stand

  arrayed or strewn, in lines as though unplanned

  and re-repeating words of other fools

  anew, to show my more pedestrian mind

  reminders that I still can think anew,

  just on a whim I look across to you

  and in your eyes and on your page I find

  eternity, infinity on earth,

  the rainbow stretched to where the planet ends

  the thunderstorms themselves your willing friends,

  the rains that drown the land to bring its birth...

  my petty counters fade: your rain transforms,

  and so I ask to share your thunderstorms.

  Finals

  I knew an undergraduate at college

  who spent his days asleep, or drinking beer;

  he never needed academic knowledge

  until the day of reckoning drew near,

  when, as he found his time was growing short,

  he'd borrow books, or photocopy them,

  and, downing frantic coffee by the quart,

  he'd burn the midnight oil, till five a.m.

  It puzzles me a little when I find

  the ones who press conversion at the end

  expecting atheists to change their mind

  in panic, like our coffee-drinking friend,

  with fingers crossed and hoping for the best

  in case this life's continuously assessed.

  Pittsburgh

  This moment, I am God upon this town.

  I compass every window spread below:

  each pinprick point in total looking down

  a pattern only overseers know.

  I feel the human flow and ebb each minute

  perceiving both with every passing breath;

  each lighted room has home and hoping in it,

  each darkening a sleeping, or a death.

  And nothing, nothing makes it wait to darken;

  had I the power it should be shining still.

  Some other one you have to hope will hearken,

  some other on some yet more lofty hill—

  whom priests and people plead to, not to be

  as powerless to hold these lights as me.

  Thomas Cantilupe

  I have no patron saint. But if I should

  I doubt that Doubting Thomas would be him.

  Though well he worked with what he understood,

  I cannot emulate my eponym:

  too squeamish still to press your bloody palms,

  too cowardly to bear the cross you bore.

  too blind to fall and sing believing psalms.

  With other saints called Thomas, all the more.

  But then there's Thomas Cantilupe's career,

  So concrete: he was born in 1218,

  was chancellor of Oxford for a year,

  gave countless counsellings to king and queen

  and years of selfless service to his see;

  and lives today recalled by God, and me.

  404

  So many years have passed since first you sought

  the lands beyond the edges of the sky,

  so many moons reflected in your eye,

  (f
amiliar newness, fear of leaving port),

  since first you sought, and failed, and learned to fall,

  (first hope, then cynicism, silent dread,

  the countless stars, still counting overhead

  the seconds to your final voyage of all...)

  and last, in glory gold and red around

  your greatest search, your final quest to know!

  yet... ashes drift, the embers cease to glow,

  and darkened life in frozen death is drowned;

  and ashes on the swell are seen no more.

  The silence surges. Error 404.

  Among those born as humans on the earth

  Among those born as humans on the earth,

  within their mind the mirrored planet lies:

  the universe contained behind their eyes,

  more tangible with every day since birth.

  Within, each place you love is held for you

  perfected; every friendship dwells therein;

  and if you dare, a thousand tales begin,

  and if you close your eyes you'll see it's true.

  Within that place a forest lies, more real

  than all on earth, and all you count as dear,

  wherever they may be, you'll find them here,

  just as in life of sight, of sound, of feel;

  there you and I will stay, and always be:

  and when you need a hug, come visit me.

  Carmen

  Your poetry holds picnics in the places

  where some would say that words should never go;

  there's strange delight in passing through those spaces

  where nouns are tame and verbs are safe to know

  to kingdoms where you colour past the lines,

  where adjectives and adverbs long to tread—

  the other side of do not enter signs

  where rulers cannot reach the words you said.

  Yet nothing's for the sake of mere transgression:

  your words below, your metaphors above,

  with every part of speech in your possession

  together make a verbal kind of love;

  conceiving thought anew, and giving birth

  to cast and recreate the very earth.

  For Fin

  When your creator took her crayon box

  That day she thought to draw you all alive,

  She found a certain green to sketch your locks,

  Another green to show you grow, you thrive;

  A green of richest thought unlimited,

  A green to match the green of your creation,

  A green to go, to boldly forge ahead,

  A green for lands of peaceful meditation;

  The Greene King, standing proud with all his queens,

  Jack-in-the-green, surrounded by his trees;

  A thousand other shades of other greens;

  The greenness of the deepness of the seas;

  And I, I fall and marvel at the light,

  A million greens, like fireworks in the night.

  For Fin — ii

  That day she thought to draw you all alive

  She drew your outline, sketched you, and refined

  And shaped your eyes, that surely saw arrive

  The laughing people in the frame behind,

  The humans, dogs and kittens, trailing plants,

  Who fill your background; all you love are here

  Around you in the middle of the dance,

  And as you watch, still more of them appear

  Beyond your face within the frame advancing

  Children and relatives and loves and friends

  Holding their merry hands in merry dancing

  Extending off beyond the picture's ends;