Thoughts in Late Spring

Bardocrat

     Apologies for being quiet for a while.  Extra time was required for reflection upon current events – primarily the eradication of an entire race of people in Palestine, the brutal assault by a rogue superpower on a sovereign country, and the ravings of a senescent narcissist in the White House. 

     I’ll post here some reflective pieces, leaving the social commentary to Satyrista.

Spring

Looked-for, anticipated, never found –

Or lost:  its coming is seen afterward,

Its going undefined, save maybe as a

Blending into Summer; so, a time you

Comprehend in retrospect – nostalgia

For a time too timeless to record.

Reborn, renewed, re-breathed with life;

All monochrome is banished and colour

Bursts out from crevice crack and liquid life,

And stirs to song all bird and beast and soul:

The Earth’s response to Spring.

Were she a woman, then a virgin be;

Desirèd ever, deflowered never;

Pleasing, teasing, coming, leaving –

Till all then fool themselves that she

Has lost her virgin self to Summer.

Subtle, subtle is her vernal presence.

No sudden switch of light, no ice to rain:

Rather, by increments, by flow and ebb,

Advance, retreat, advance again; till days

Arrive when Spring no longer seems, but is.

Subtle, subtle is her vernal presence.

On her in vain you shower facts:

You know her only by her acts.

So, subtle must your own observance be.

She loosens winter’s austere chains,

Frees the ice-locked pond,

Swells the shabby brook

Whose spangled gratitude wakes sleeping buds

Upon the weeping willows.  Weep no more!

Yet they don’t open yet:  they fear a change.

Subtle, subtle is her vernal presence.

On her in vain you shower facts:

You know her only by her acts.

So, subtle must your own observance be.

All nature’s denizens, they know her ways,

And go about their business unperturbed.

The signs are there for anyone who’ll look.

The silky mole heaves up the chocolate loam

Beneath the hawthorn hedge where dunnocks court,

Shy primrose flowers peep with lemon eyes

Past bluebells’ sticky stems, all floral gems.

And gnats know too:  a fountain furious,

They dance the solstice at lulled evening’s toll:

Up, down, back, forth; one moment at the crown,

Where autumn’s spiders left their webs, then down

Past last year’s whitethroat nest in twiggy bower,

On down to worry nervy rabbits’ ears,

Just emerged, and eager for a cowslip.

Downwind, a fox sits at the copse edge, but

No urgency in him to stalk and kill

’Cause winter’s hunger’s gone; so he’ll enjoy

A scratch, a stretch, a sampling of the air,

Now new and sweet – postpone the supper fare!

Deemed safe, the rabbits’ kits emerge, their eyes

Stare, fit to mesmerise, the cowslip bells

At moonrise under owl call.  Ululate

He may:  but so he brags his territory;

Besides, he much prefers those voles who chew

The vernal grass, that meadow bed of spring.

Before its azimuth, the moon inspires

That premier symphonist, the nightingale.

His dexterous euphony springs suddenly

From densest thickets where no eyes might pierce,

And with a suddenness which shocks the soul –

Even those who wait on it, a sonnet

Somehow make of it, this avian spirit,

Belovèd poets’ muse, no finer air.

The courting pheasant crows his sovereignty

At daybreak as the frost’s lustre is morphed

To mist by the sun’s breath, gloriously.

A hen replies, but not his dowdy dams;

A moorhen, scudding through those mists which curl

Across her pond like they had purpose too,

Jerks to her floating nest and vents her voice:

Intrude not in my water-world, pass by

Like coot and mallard – don’t my patience try!

Even hibernacula deep buried

Far from sound, still there the call is heard.

It wakes the frog and toad and newt to life,

Compels them to reprise that play again:

That annual act none would deny or claim.

Soon in the reeds and weeds their sticky spawn

Will advertise the latest round of life

Sprung out the mind of evolution’s muse.

Nor moments wasted here, nor tasks refused.

Deer in ‘velvet’ shedding, eyeing badger

Chewing orchis root under rookery

Where fledgling rejects fell to waiting jaws.

No sentimental scruples meted there.

Nor at the hedge eaves where a goshawk leaves

A flash of feathers and a muted thud

To mark the space where song thrush sat and sang:

Plucked him from a briar like an apple snatched.

His springtime rills left now to memory.

Hirundo! Hirundo! – this was the call

Old Gilbert in his Journal penned for us.

One swallow doesn’t summer make, but spring

We know is here when swallows crowd the skies;

Sloe blossoms punctuate the lanes in cream;

Hares loon mild hours on the greener fields;

 Chiff-chaff saws at blackcap’s virtuosity;

And sappy elders rise above crushed garlic

At the copse eaves where a cuckoo called

At last light yesterday – so someone said.

Subtle, subtle is her vernal presence.

On her in vain you shower facts:

You know her only by her acts.

So, subtle must your own observance be.

Sweet Lunacy

The full-faced moon glimmers on my garden.

The old year dies on the New Year’s breath.

Dormant seeds stir in their loamy matrix

With a pull which the seas must heed; and death

Seems than life less melancholy, for its tricks

Show how each is yet a phase of the other:

We die but to live and to rediscover.

Two moons glower in a face of hatred,

In the face of a gun-gulled Balkan ghost;

A half-mooned, half-man seeking nothing

But to still the seed that stirs, the boasts

Of love and hope, that shape his handsome neighbour,

Tending by night his bomb-blown backyard Eden,

Where once green peas he shelled:  now lead

Peas shell him, and his beetroot blood smokes

On the lips his lover kissed just now in bed.

Now that silver crescent grins on my musing.

How like the trigger of a gun it looks!

No more of that:  I am into a poem;

For the moment I’ve thrown up my books.

My love!  I must lyricise your virtues;

Your beauty – outer, inner – holds me captive;

I must sing of you before I sow or sleep.

I’ll be with you on the morrow.  O what sorrow

Could soil a love like ours? The very stars us keep;

Two peas in silver pods, of star-stuff made.

But,O that grin! – a gun bit?  Now a sneer?

It winks a secret none may sesame.

It mimes a death-kiss from its heights of ice:

Metamorphosed mountains hide those morons.

Soiled fingers twitch upon those new-moon ‘triggers’,

And the sight-bead at the deadly end

Is like a black full moon:  the two align,

The finger jerks, and down the tube malign

Zips the leaden death, a hot slug seeking prey,

And finding it in the sanguine beating heart

Born in the breath of Adam’s own dear Eve,

Who left the motley blanket pile, their bed,

To seek him on their moonlit garden plot.

Upon his corpse she falls, and breathes

The last breath blown to her this time around:

And all about them lie their unsown seeds

Which would have fed their lovers’ salad days.

Now all about me as I sit

Are piles of paper words which

Make no sense of it.

My God!  My love! Might we tomorrow

See that same moon sneer on us?

That same fickle sickle scything

Through our fields of bliss –

Our sapling plans and hopes –

Such swathes of searing sorrow?

[Originally dedicated to the Balkan War] 

Love’s Lesson

The evening stars which shine above our joy

Shine quite as brightly over killing-fields

Whose barren acres ploughs might bring to yield,

Were they not scored where war-machines deploy.

The pleasure we reciprocate reflects

Unseen, but felt, across the world of sense;

Where it impinges, might it recompense

The kindred hearts and homes which war has wrecked?

We must believe it so, and call it prayer,

Else all our love descends to selfishness:

The trite conviction that our brief distress

Is equal to our neighbour’s black despair.

Love cannot thrive on isolation’s muse.

To grow, should its largesse not radiate

Across the cold wastes of the human state?

More desperate than our love is love refused.

One mighty being in an antique land

Had his nativity hailed by a star,

To show the world unworldly love by far

Outshines those lesser loves we understand.

And yet we must each other love.  It’s true:

Love’s secret purpose is to lure us here,

In sensual practice for the higher sphere

Where greater love evolves beyond our view.

So, yet, we love not vainly when we kiss,

Because, in loving, more we radiate

Than we consume. The excess operates

Beyond those stars which shine upon our bliss.

Satyrista

     Instead of Bardocrat’s offerings from the romanticized realms of poetry, we at Satyrista have opted for a mix of history and social commentary.

     Nuff sed?

Ukraine invaded Russia? 

Satyrista explains how and why:

As a Jew and a comedian, President Zelensky accumulated advanced occult powers.  When he divined from the ether (otherwise known as Facebook) that China was tacitly supporting Russia, he teleported himself to the dark side of the Moon, where China had just discovered a cache of Fabergé eggs, hidden there by Russian cosmonauts after the Bolshevik revolution. Whilst studying the Eggs, he was sustained by dark matter, dark chocolate, and by the dark oxygen of the aura popularis (otherwise known as the Internet.) Unfortunately, on the return journey to Earth, underfunded and short-sighted European defense forces mistook the Chinese capsule for a meteorite and shot it down. To avoid China declaring war on Europe, President Zelensky bravely declared war on Russia – as a diversionary tactic – further daring them to retrieve their Fabergé eggs, which he had placed in mares’ nests built on the crowns of giant redwood trees growing in Kiev’s Maidan Square.

But this backfired.  The Russian army could not deploy because the streets of Moscow were blocked by herds of pink elephants; nor could the Russian air-force get airborne because the whole of Russia’s airspace was filled with flying pigs.  The Russian secret Services’ cavalry did their best; but the unicorns they were riding slipped on the dung from the flying pigs and so lost their fragile grip on reality.  (They have now returned to the development of waterproof men’s briefs and a new sweet called Novichoklate, which the Kremlin plans to export to the West completely free – yet another example of the Kremlin’s abiding generosity.)

Anyway, the Patriarch of Moscow resolved everything.  With a sleight of eleemosynary, he nullified President Zelensky’s occult powers – by rubbing his own eggs until a flock of Dodos hatched out and abruptly transmogrified into Christian warriors who were programmed by AI to counter-attack Kiev in order to retrieve the said Fabergé masterpieces – and, of course, to repel the invading Ukrainians.  Unfortunately, the orthodox Dodos had not been fitted with GPS and so could not find Kiev, got hopelessly lost – and, in a fit of pique, destroyed Mariupol instead.  Unfortunately, this debacle also upset Trump Towers because Elon Musk owned a factory there where he was developing electric eels, with which he and Trump hoped to solve all those slippery and shocking world problems – from the cruel Palestinian occupation of Israel to the terrifying outbreaks of democracy in so many similar countries.

And, of course, the above scenario additionally explains why Kiev offended Russia, why Mariupol (not Kiev) was flattened, what the Chinese were really doing on the dark side of the Moon, why Dodos are extinct (again), why eggs have gone up in price, why dark chocolate is very nourishing, why dark matter is truly interesting, why eleemosynary should have an additional ‘e’, why the church has no balls, and why the price of bacon is soaring.