The Last Enemy

I am so old, oh very old, my children,
   Ye that are so young,

Music and the Heart run hand in hand
Naked over the shining sand,

In the summit song of youth
A quiet quick catch of the breath.

Before I loved or knew you were
   I spoke as I had eyes,

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

Alone to walk the dripping woods of spring
   While daisies spy you?

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

‘All things are flux: there’s nothing fast,’
Said Heraclitus, ages past,

…the thunder growling,
And winds mounting, and the sky falling,
And night, and you not here.

This is where the water hurries under the archway,
This is where we enter the long tunnel,

Gone away, away,
Suddenly at a word departed,

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

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

Part of me for ever is the January morning
Coming into the Clyde in the frosty moonlight

..The fifth day of November, Fifty North and Forty West,
Was edging to its departure, like an undecided guest,

The drowsy air, the throngs that gaze,
The ceremonial stir,
Mixed with the drone of Latin phrase..

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

My nine-hours son, so wrinkle-faced
Wry concentration of distaste
To find your Person so displaced,

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,

You spoke, after long years, about the morning
That followed the night your first-born son was born:

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

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

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

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

You are late coming home
To the house we share
An audible silence
Chills the air

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

They’re burning Old Sox’s shack
Just two weeks since he died.

My love, I watch you thread your way, and turn
with a small timeless smile, and trail your trolley
unhurried through the gate of no return.

Crossing the highway, furtive as a snake,
it slips through bush towards indeterminate hills.

Spring, at a bound. Once more the colourful chorus,
Daffodils first declare their lyric yellow,

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

Now for your birthday the single prunus bough,
by neighbour ’s kindness spared on a sentenced tree

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

Always a step ahead, you’re eighty-three,
My life-support, contending other me,

Down arches of the years I hear your voice
explaining serials of our late departures,

Six years since your last birthday in our midst
seems yesterday, in this same so-loved house,

Wrapped in my gown of self-regard sublime
I heard your voice arrive from outer space.

Knowing the time was short
Yours was the instant thought
‘Let’s go up to the Rocks!’

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

Ten years since that incalculable day
When from all worlds we know you slipped away

Alone to walk the dripping woods of spring
   While daisies spy you?

This is where the water hurries under the archway,
This is where we enter the long tunnel,

No drums they wished, whose thoughts were tied
To girls and jobs and mother,

Gone away, away,
Suddenly at a word departed,

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

In this dread hour for thee and all mankind
Britain, be Freedom’s fortress or her grave.

..The fifth day of November, Fifty North and Forty West,
Was edging to its departure, like an undecided guest,

We lay in Iceland winterbound,
And heard the blizzard blow,

Above the great ship’s lifting bow
I watch the Pole Star nightly stand,

The story, as now we see, was over-written
By Herodotus, bless his warm Hellenic heart!

You may not pass this place. Here you must stop,
Though all the world’s great tides run heedless by

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

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.

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.

These trees reached up for light
when Jesus walked on earth,

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