So little egrets spread while sparrows fail
So what, and what's an egret, the reply.
We need no local warning, we must die
Tomorrow; don't be solemn, drink your ale.
In hope, we have expressed a slight concern
That generates an automatic sneer,
Indifference prevails; but should we fear
The ratpack, raving, giggling, turn by turn?
We face extinction or eternity,
And cannot yet avoid, though we may try,
Our expectation of the death of air.
Consent is not an answer; we are free.
And hope itself compels us to deny
That hope depends entirely on despair.
Coming to school in double summer time,
A quiet dawn-lit walk.
Sitting in folding desks, paired in three
Rooms with classes small enough to talk.
Four years each teacher, learned in rhyme;
The school is still a shape of chalk
Surrounded by a ruined tree.
In lines we chanted
Tables, and the rooks nested
In the long thicket across the road
Winding by the playground where we rested.
Light through lead diamonds slanted
On hot children kept inside. Tested
On twelve nines we lost the code.
The war ended. Back to town.
Home with electric light and cars to wait
For on the way. Joined script now;
No more loops; no printing after eight.
School cream, church brown
And teachers hurt a child for being late.
Three years after - pi is constant - knowing how.
A cold morning, early monochrome,
Harsh lit, hard to pick out, bare,
And a present menace there on a small track,
An ill premonition of a presence where
The scene is static. Like a gnome
Below sentience is the movement there,
Known like a half-memory turning back.
Later there comes one figure seen
To be human only in the event
Shared with the unknown enmity,
And is without expression or intent
Until the eyes reflect, and there has been
A rush to place itself, then puzzlement
And fear, forgetfulness and vacancy.
We that are always disempowered
And lack the artfulness to sigh,
We that can only dream our soured
Answers; words cannot apply
Our thoughts to those that seem to fly
To satisfaction in a gale.
It is not true that we deny
The earth's song to tell the winter's tale.
Tradition says that talent flowered
And it sufficed to satisfy.
Lyric poesy was showered;
Sense and sentiment were high.
So it served to amplify
The traction of their social sail.
Perhaps we do not dare defy
The earth's song or tell the winter's tale.
So the language rubbed and scoured
All its implications dry.
As that verbal structure towered
It only served to horrify
The meek and kind and pure and shy.
See in a fading vapour trail
Across a multi-coloured sky
The earth's song, it tells the winter's tale.
The fact of what it is to try
Is only known by us, who fail;
And still we sing, until we die,
The earth's song, or tell the winter's tale.
This is convention: sing a careless air;
Maintain without exception manic tone.
Admission is to stimulate despair
Against the sympathy of friendly stone.
The truth is altered to a hostile moan.
My smile is fixed, it hides a soul distressed;
But in my story I am not alone,
The moon is also silent in the nest.
So secretly we may not hope to care
That we are scorned in skin and flesh and bone;
And what we bear we do not say we bear
Or tell the livelihood we lose when thrown
Into the swirling harvest we have sown.
Never admit it. We are not depressed
By the foreclosure of the final loan.
The moon is also silent in the nest.
We play a patient endless solitaire,
And in the wooden silence we are shown
And know that grace and beauty are not fair.
And then the voice that tells us is our own;
A tinny simulated xylophone,
Only by tunelessness is it caressed.
What we deny is lost, is still unknown;
The moon is also silent in the nest.
The works of righteousness cannot atone;
And claims of wisdom do not pass the test.
What will not work in words is seldom shown;
The moon is also silent in the nest.