PEOPLE
And finally some observations about individuals living and dead.
Van Gogh – Sunflowers
The sunflowers bare their heads
In the furrowed field.
The glaring gold and reds
Are searingly annealed.
Green fire runs up cypresses
And flickers into night.
The inferno of a cornfield
Is a granary of light.
The peasant send a plough-wave
Rippling across the marl
And the painter is enveloped
In the holocaust of Arles.
He shimmers in the heat-wave
And throbs with pulsing sun,
And from the brick-kiln stumbles
The heliotropic man.
Soaking in the sun-field
He strokes the summer day
With sunflower oil on canvas
And rills of ochrous clay.
Red hair runs up cypresses
And green fire in his veins.
In the madness of the sunshine
Only genius is sane.
Where Have All The Flowers Gone?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beslan_school_hostage_crisis
It is the first day of school in Beslan
And the pupils have brought flowers for their teachers,
Bouquets of roses, posies of violets
And great armfuls of wild flowers from the steppes.
The girls are pretty in their Sunday frocks.
The boys close-cropped in shorts at least are clean.
In Mr Abashvilli’s senior English class
They are studying Hamlet, a tragedy.
To be or not to be was today’s question.
Dead Ophelia floated water lily fair
Among the spreading stain of red azolla fern.
Katrina Ivanova in her white communion dress
Was likely to have proved most royal.
In Miss Nijinsky’s still life art
The children paint a vase of geraniums
In a wash of gentle water colours.
The blush of pelargonium red bleeds
Down the white paper and blurs
Like the words of a love letter in a splash of tears.
In Mrs Kalin’s mathematics class
The inchworms are measuring metric marigolds.
Yuri dreamily plucks petals off his teacher’s bosom.
She loves me, she loves me not, as she points out
Fibonacci sequences in the swirl of florets
In a sunflower head that turns no more to the sun.
Golda Rosenkranz plays gypsy dances on her violin
And practises scales, for arbeit makes free.
At the Moscow Conservatory she will wear a single orchid.
Anna Petraskaya does pliés at the bar with her long thin legs
And wrinkled leotard. She bows at the Bolshoi to receive
Her bouquet of a hundred roses.
In Mr Dimitrov’s history class
The students see the soldiers walk breast and bayonet high
Amid the cornflowers and the scarlet poppies
In the fields of Normandy.
They watch the fireweed willowherb burst like an aneurysm
Over the burnt, blackened bombsites of Stalingrad.
But Peter lets rosebay willowherb loosestrife in France
And poppies bloom like paratroopers over the Ukraine.
Will that child never learn?
“Gone to graveyards everyone.
When will they ever learn?”
A Christian’s Heart
I looked into a Christian’s heart
And saw the fires of conviction
Char grilling homosexuals
In the burning pits of hell.
Abortionists stood in line,
Atheists and Jews as well.
I looked into a Christian’s mind,
Shocked at the ignorance I find.
I tread knee-deep in the ash of libraries.
Statues of Copernicus, Wegener,
Mendel and Darwin lie beheaded
With marble genitals hacked off.
The highway to truth is blocked
By barricades of bibles
Manned by Sunday school children
With long blonde hair and kerchiefs.
Science walks naked in chains,
Her eyes blinded with hot irons,
Her back scourged with the whips of the faithful.
Her shoulders though are straight
And her back remains unbowed.
I looked in a Christian’s conscience
And saw the twisted knots of guilt,
The rabid drool of bigotry.
I could see the Star Chamber
Where the priests carved “apocalypse now”
In invisible writing on her brow.
Religion had like a giant kidney stone
Or tumour in her psyche grown.
Deaf to argument or reason,
Too late to save or operate.
Sew her back up. Leave ill alone.
I looked into a Christian’s eyes
And saw god made in the image of man,
Stern, paternalistic, bearded male,
Spoiling no child, and sparing no rod
And saw an alpha monkey there,
Ironical template of her god.
I looked into a Christian’s fears
And saw the devil lurking there
With phallic horns and phallic tale,
Her personal demon clearly male,
The embodiment of her sense of sin,
Her own carnal urge within.
She doubtless yearns for heaven’s gate
To avoid the need to defecate.
Salon
The girls have turned my room
Into a hair-dressing salon.
They chew gum, listen to rap music
On the radio, wear uniform.
Yet they form a timeless tableau –
Women grooming each other’s hair
In the most feminine of rituals.
There is ancient magic in this scene.
Their hair is let down
To cascade over the shoulders of the world.
They could be sitting by the waters of Babylon
Or in a mammoth-hunter’s tent.
Such asexual tenderness is denied to men,
Such easy intimacy of touch.
This is tribal, atavistic, primal stuff.
These girls are transported back
To the misty dawn of history,
To the origins of our race.
This is hair as hair should be –
Unbraided, lustrous and long.
This is a rite of womanhood.
Mantilla
I cannot love you limb-soft youth
With down upon your upper lip
And lust and innocence in your eyes,
Nor make a maiden’s sacrifice.
Go first fulfill your wanderlust,
Make something of yourself young man.
Return with wisdom, beard and wealth,
And I shall love if I can.
I cannot love you thick-necked man,
With your moustache and sabre scar.
You have been too close to death,
Seen too much blood, too much despair.
What is my virtue worth to you,
Who have slept with whores in Kazakhstan?
Yet I shall marry you, bear your child,
Pretend to love you if I can.
I cannot love you husband mine,
Varicosed and full of phlegm.
I abhor your touch beneath the sheet,
Your breaking wind, your teeth, your feet
And odours that accompany them.
We are strangers to each other.
You never were my youthful lover.
I do not have to love you then.
I shall wear a black mantilla
As I follow your horse drawn hearse.
I shall be seen to decently weep
As sombre in my widow’s weeds I creep.
In the yard I shall burn your clothes,
Spring clean the house as best I can.
Lying alone in my narrow bed
I shall love you in the end my man.
Deirdre
Deirdre, sorrow’s child, do not dread
The dreary days and emptiness.
Although the vampire left you bloodless,
You are not diminished by the walking dead.
Only the hard heart stays unbroken;
Only the skinflint soul cares not to bleed.
You nurture still your dormant seed.
Your pale cheeks are your heartfelt token.
In the warm dark barn the horses hide;
Warm nose muzzling, soft breast nuzzling.
And red blood resurges in your veins.
The air is charged, electrified.
After the drought and dry withering
Splashes the downpour of the quick rains.
Lizard Orchids
Google Image Result for http://www.lorne14.plus.com/Lizard_0pt.jpg
Zlatan Osmanovic was twenty-three,
Six foot tall, dark extensive stubble,
Betrothed to Jasmina, yet not a man.
Not in his village in Herzegovina.
Not tending tomatoes in his father’s field.
He had heard that in Germany
They needed so-called Gastarbeiter.
A Bosniak could earn enough to return
With a suitcase full of Deutschmarks,
Perhaps, who knows, a Volkswagen.
Paul and Hazel were innocents abroad,
A fresh-faced, peaches and cream couple
With their cute, blonde, Aryan kids
On holiday in pretty Yugoslavia.
They had parked their campervan
On the shores of a lake in Macedon
Where the tall mysterious lizard orchids grew.
And now two days later in the early dawn,
To avoid travel in the baking heat of noon,
They were driving up a mountain road in Bosnia.
On the right a steep garigue mountainside.
On the left a giddy drop to the valley floor.
Small white stones marked the precipice.
Rounding a bend they met a weird sight,
A dust-devil tumble-weed alien
Rolling head over heels, roof over wheels.
Time stood still in utter frozen silence,
Until suddenly it lurched again
With a screech of metal on gravel,
The crash of smashed glass
And the hysterical scream of a woman,
As the mirage metamorphosed into
A Volkswagen beetle spinning on its back.
Paul couldn’t open the squashed doors
Until the driver, his face streaming blood,
Crawled out of the shattered windscreen
And together they righted the car.
They extracted Jasmina still screaming
Through the little sunroof and the baby
Chortling over a piece of windscreen glass.
They had driven through the night from Dortmund
And had fallen asleep at the wheel so close to home.
The English couple stowed their gear aboard
And drove them back down to Mostar hospital.
Zlatan, a Samaritan on the Damascus Road,
Was forced to beg help from the infidel,
From this fuzzy cheeked youth and his pallid wife.
Speaking in the grammarless basic Deutsch
Whereby the Germans demean their guests,
He asked whether Paul could take a message
To his folks in the mountain village
That totally lacked a telephone.
Paul could have refused. Hadn’t he done enough?
Why should he help this tall, dark stranger
Who oozed charisma from his deep set eyes,
Whose etched jaw was blue with whiskers?
But somehow he took the scribbled map and note,
That for all he knew said, “Shoot the bearer.”
They went for miles up a mountain road
That disintegrated into a set of cartwheel ruts.
They showed the note to peasants in the fields,
Muslim women dressed in black
Who wailed and waved them further on
Until eventually they arrived at a place
Where the note had a pronounced effect.
The whole village flocked in from the fields,
Women ululating in peasant grief,
Grim faced men in shirt sleeves and braces,
Desperate to learn the detailed truth.
Mahir Kulenovic who had been in Hamburg
Was sent for to be interpreter
And Paul, young, pale and intellectual,
Was seated on the chair of honour
Under the Muscat vine among the elders,
Weather-tanned faces and fierce moustaches.
They plied him with little cups of Turkish coffee
And the women made kind gestures to Hazel
And commented on the white-blonde children.
Mrs Osmanovic appeared in her best black frock,
Her husband in an uncomfortable suit,
Prepared to visit their son in Mostar hospital.
Before they left the villagers emptied
Basketful after basketful of tomatoes, peppers,
Cucumbers and aubergines into the campervan.
Many years later Paul read that Mostar
And the surrounding villages
Were ethnically cleansed by the Serbs.
Thousands of Muslim men and boys
Were rounded up and simply shot.
Perhaps the baby in the car was one of them.
And still in pretty Yugoslavia
The mysterious lizard orchids grow.
Figures at a Funeral
The undertaker suitably pin-striped and gaunt
With an Adam’s apple of Dickensian size.
Little Ernie, the physiotherapist
Looking dapper and somewhat Mafioso
In his best suit and opaque sunglasses.
Did you know that his mother was Japanese
And that he has an identical twin?
Big John, six foot four and feet like dinner plates,
Unemployed, some say out of choice.
Lost his teenage son in a car accident.
Lindsay with his beer gut and missing teeth,
Not quite fresh from his shift at the abattoir,
Steps outside to pander to his addiction.
You would never guess he had a voice like Caruso.
Her erstwhile boss at the polytechnic
Who interspersed praise for her professionalism
With plugs for his business studies course.
Her students, the young men in sneakers
And teeshirts, the best gear they could muster
To honour her passing, the girls likewise
With studs in their navels and hipsters
Flying at half mast down their bums.
Quentin with his walking sticks and shaved head,
Making this a dry run for his own funeral.
Her best friend, Mairi, gives the eulogy,
The makeup running on her matronly face.
All remaining members of her wine-club
There to drink her favourite chardonnay.
Her ex-husband somewhat ostracized,
But honouring her at last.
The daughters, tall and tragic in black
With nice breasts somewhat irrelevant today.
The lover, a carpenter by trade,
Who never had a suit to his name,
Standing awkwardly, not quite family
In his shiny shoes and best jeans.
Referred to simply in the funeral notice
As “and Phil, a friend”, although it was he
Who sat by her bedside in her last days
And he who held her hand at midnight.
The Black Spot and the Brick
There is an envelope in my pigeonhole,
brown and official.
Last year the Anglo-Indian lady
was given her notice.
She was perceived as inefficient,
too soft to control children,
too old to coach netball.
We shuddered collectively
and went about our tasks.
I have this psoriasis (sorry-ah-sis)
or eczema or pruritic dermatitis –
the seven-minute itch.
Maybe it’s exposure at the chalk face.
Twenty odd years ago
the kitten caught its paws in the door.
I hit it on the head with a brick
to put me out of my misery.
This year the Anglo-Indian lady
retired conveniently
to nurse her diabetes and her grievances.
We all breathed more easily
and shuffled to take up the slack.
I have a colleague
with a clear and youthful skin
who can teach Japanese and coach netball.
The school sores on my hands are worse.
The doctor is trying antibiotics,
but nothing seems to help.
Last week I was made a part-time person.
There were clucks of public sympathy.
I put on a brave face –
war-paint and streaks of tears.
The doctor thinks I should have a blood-test.
Slow healing is suspicious.
He suspects diabetes,
but I didn’t think it was contagious.
I look at the unopened envelope.
I stare at my mangled paws
and wait for the brick.
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