Last Stand

Look where he lies, a clod of earth at best,
Yet colder than a clod, for where there shone

Out of this questioning, eventual truth;
Out of this doubt, faith rooted in the rock;

..By a blue winking sea,
The church stands in a green place,
Green as Calvary.

“Boy killed on Bicycle”; smallest print, four lines
Islanded in a tossing sea of type,

Out of the cloud my Lord the Sun,
Out of the earth my Lady Spring,

That dreaming day it was, the bell-like air
Unclosed the naked admirable heaven,

Come death suddenly from the sea or cloud,
With the blast of thunder and the blinding shroud,

If I should die, grieve not for youth
Blighted, and towers of hope that fell

Now, when the smoking ruins smoulder low
Of what was Europe once

This mountain means discovery, since the day
I climbed it first in boyhood and alone,

The ancient art of story-telling charms
The ear, keeps its first hold on men
The whole world over.

Could we locate the enemy of mankind
(I mean the GHQ, the Centre itself,

When a man dies
We find that suddenly there’s time to praise him.

Waylaid by Handel’s theme, I think of you
Now half a world away, and hear you say
‘His music always seems like coming home.’

You hold the timeless in your brief green boughs
The cardboard angels, home-made crib, the straw,
The new-born baby older than Abraham

Between the tumult of crucifixion
and the diapason of resurrection
that bar of absolute silence.

…Listening,
I am bereft, lost in the mystery
of music leaping quenchless, undefiled

‘The love that moves the sun and all the stars’ –
When Dante wrote there was no telescope:

Like liquid silk in golden eddies
the honey laps into my tin.

It was a terrible world
And into it came a child

Heard how often, still the notes compel
Unused to awe, we stand listening.

Lord of earth and all creation
let your love possess our land;

..stamped with a star, but posted beyond the stars,
marked ‘No Commercial Value’, signed, with a cross,

Fare well. We come to send you on the way
we all must walk, so final, secret, strange.

The greatest word in the greatest book
is that conjunction, ‘Nevertheless’,

Arrived at the heavenly mansions, the blessed Saint
(female on earth) was welcomed by St Peter

Land of the singing light
Light that first I saw
Eighty years and more

Moths! Moths! Moths!
In trouser-leg, singlet and shirt..

“Up here the schooners used to come
  For timber, years ago,

My love and I in all agree
   As one, save this thing only:

Not vile, body, nor foe, flesh,
Your joys deluding, triumphs trash,
Fit to be foiled your every wish.

The host of hills encamped around,
The sleepless army of the stars,

Out of the cloud my Lord the Sun,
Out of the earth my Lady Spring,

Spring held her fire
So long, the long pursuit, the watchers wondered
Would there be ever an end

Twelve foot’s the rise and fall
Of barometric Man

This mountain means discovery, since the day
I climbed it first in boyhood and alone,

Hauled headlong starward by the quadruple conviction
Of lion-lunged engines in their pride of power

Dark sea dark land lie close beneath
The muffling guilt of night,

From this rock spine, not three feet wide,
Rivers of a continent divide

The sun like a centaur leaping the ranges
Shoots to the heart my garden, shatters
The dew in a volley of wild carillons

Riding the wind, in planetary sweep,
The gull wheels on the radius of a wing.

Straggling off the highway in search of firewood
Past the tins and bottles, through the rusty wire,

Stentorian mountain, resonant as your name,
I greet you with joy, I greet you, I give you thanks

The rousing sun’s sea-dance and dazzle
Burnishes grassy cape and cliff,

Waking to a diapason in the downpipe
I peer through curtained panes to a curtained sky

You hold the timeless in your brief green boughs
The cardboard angels, home-made crib, the straw,
The new-born baby older than Abraham

When you were caught red-rooted in the drain
You wept of course, but did the same again

Down the cliff path, in morning sun
Sliding, we stopped. The beach had gone,

The young magpie, as large as either parent,
Piteously pleads the pathos of his need.

The tree-trunk rounds, a fallen Doric column,
are tumbled on the grass beside my gate.

No dolphin it was, but a six-month suckling whale
gashed and shark-mauled, tribeless, motherless,

Little death of a little dog
In a death-wish world of news by body-count

At first it seemed a trek of migrant ants
climbing the skyline of this great red rock

A garden gracious, serene and spacious at Lambeth –
This is the dream, the vision that shall be its crown

..Three kangaroos, grey eminences, rose
staring, paws crossed, with worried faces fixed,

I heard a man of science tell:
The sun is ringing like a bell,

Come down from that Crest! It’s Australia Day, Emu –
We just want to say, mate, how much we esteem you.

… obliterating in instant mini-time
a universe of suns and planets
with or without their myriad forms of life,

With joyless spade I dig the tiny grave
Asking, who made me lord of life or death?

He lies unblinking, back and corpulent,
first lizard from his hibernation sleep