too much said
emptily voiced rhetoric
but still
just to live freely
common place together
oh those old gods again
don’t we always dream of them?
our circumstances
caught this?
let’s start again
The People’s Republic of Albion
– truly meant
– who wouldn’t desire this?
dignified women & men relishing their lives
who can accept anything for us that’s less?
old stars –
what shattered fragments watch us
we are children
our knowledge of this world
too brief
do you remember landscapes
or people?
maybe failure here1
Alle die Schlafgestalten, kristallin
die du annahmst
im Sprachschatten,
ihnen
führ ich mein Blut zu
Paul Celan, “Alle die Schlafgestalten”, in edited & translated by Michael Hamburger, Paul Celan: Poems (Carcanet New Press, 1980), p 296
The crowd howls like a woman in labour. The crowd writhes in giving birth to its own destiny … Everything is ardour and clamour, creation and intoxication, peril and victory, beneath the murky sky of battle where swallows flash and cry.
Gabriele D’Annunzio, speech May 1915, quoted in Lucy Hughes-Hackett, The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio poet seducer & preacher of war (Fourth Estate, 2013), p 2962
complex surfaces
– yes that’s a good slogan
what we must aim for
pullulating & fractal
this whole thin membrane
so fragile
mustn’t let it break
regret the morning in a coffee shop
trying to write poetry
about the sunlight in the street
& the people
passing in & out
not the top of craft
its lowliness to love
only us at last
ran to the ship and thanked
if we’re not dead
we’d better try living
this time round at last3
1 “Oh jesus! Too true. Time to bring on the quotations now & see if they’ll help us get going again.”
2 “Ahh, listen you can actually hear the twin glittering swollen bollox of the political poet chiming here.”
3 “Oh dear fuck – this poetry is depressingly hopeful as it ends. Easy to maintain that negative critical stance when you’re a university lecturer – the rest of us poor mortal wretches need something better this time round, I can tell you.”