Category Archives: Poetry

have an oily railyard lantern flare
of equivocal blaze. Sometimes, when so
inclined, the coastal jinn give off a musk
animal glow such as cat fur produces on a rainy day.
They are fond of tall tales and they cluster round
the burner when the bunn is being roasted.
As the magic whiff
of freshly roasted coffee beans climbs up
the hairy wall of the tent and as tranquility
glints in the smug crimson of the coal,
the jinn begin to gloss the words of men.

Their speech is an incised shape of silence, an intaglio,
in which the word is not a single, schisted bloc
of sense, like ours, but guards its pristine
opacity and is impossible
for any dragoman to approximate

We can only
struggle to imagine their colloquies,
all consonant and sukûn,
a gravity of gesture tinged by the fire they are—
ingot-malleable, nugget-plush, pyritic and aureate—
and yet, for all their clang,

perorating and impulsive as a flame.

Eric Ormsby, from Araby, included in Time’s Covenant: Selected Poems

Sleep sleep old Sun, thou canst not have repast
As yet, the wound thou took’st on friday last;
Sleepe then, and rest; The world may beare thy stay,
A better Sun rose before thee to day,
Who, not content to’enlighten all that dwell
On the earths face, as thou, enlightened hell,
And made the darke fires languish in that vale,
As, at thy presence here, our fires grow pale.
Whose body having walk’d on earth, and now
Hasting to Heaven, would, that he might allow
Himselfe unto all stations, and fill all,
For these three daies become a minerall;
Hee was all gold when he lay downe, but rose
All tincture, and doth not alone dispose
Leaden and iron wills to good, but is
Of power to make even sinfull flesh like his.
Had one of those, whose credulous pietie
Thought, that a Soule one might discerne and see
Goe from a body, at this sepulcher been,
And, issuing from the sheet, this body seen,
He would have justly thought this body a soule,
If not of any man, yet of the whole.

John Donne, before 1633

Before the mountains were brought forth, before
     Earth and the world were made, then God was God :
And God will still be God when flames shall roar
     Round earth and heaven dissolving at His nod :
     And this God is our God, even while His rod
Of righteous wrath falls on us smiting sore :
And this God is our God for evermore,
     Through life, through death, while clod returns to clod.
For though He slay us we will trust in Him ;
     We will flock home to Him by divers ways :
     Yea, though He slay us we will vaunt His praise,
Serving and loving with the Cherubim,
Watching and loving with the Seraphim,
     Our very selves His praise through endless days.

Christina Georgina Rossetti, before 1882

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of Innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Who are “the best” but the boni of our day—the politicians like their forebears, ancient cynical senators jockeying for power, for the role of princeps. What conviction do they display, with their records of social and political policies changing with the wind of opinion? The courage of their conviction goes only so deep as their demagoguery finds necessary—in another day, a week, perhaps a month—never so long as a year!—all is changed. Is is not that “Power corrupts” or even “Power corrupts the corruptible” but that “Power is corruption.”

Who are “the worst . . . full of passionate intensity,” but the terrorists of these days and their enablers, of whom are some of “the best”? Such coarse certitude, drawing lines that none may cross but themselves, they with an adolescent fixation on an imagined utopia of fairness—one founded on their own terms, and thus eminently “fair” only to themselves!—a utopia as imaginary as every other ever imagined by minds both greater and lesser.

And yet Yeats wrote this so long ago, in 1921 or before, with very different referents in mind. Even so, do we not think, all of us, but for some very brief interludes when all is well with us, that in our generations each one of them is (again) the time when some “rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born”? Is not every generation prone to see (again) the coming of the man of sin, the lawless one, the antichrist, the beast, the great Satan, Beliar—and the end of the world is at hand (again)?

From my journal, and spruced up a bit. On the night of 1 February 2008, reflecting on Fr Andrew Louth’s quotation of Yeats (at the top of the post) in his Discerning the Mystery, p. 1

O, never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seem’d my flame to qualify.
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie :
That is my home of love : if I have ranged,
Like him that travels, I return again ;
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,
So that myself bring water for my stain.
Never believe, though in my nature reign’d
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,
That it could so preposterously be stain’d,
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good ;
        For nothing this wide universe I call,
        Save thou, my rose ; in it thou art my all.

Wm Shakespeare. Sonnet CIX.

The shore rang under my heel
After the squall: delicate eyelids
Of shell, the scattered audacities
Limestone confects: those peach-stung
Volutes of supersession, cowrie
And turkey wing, the murex with its
Acrid spirals and the bony rose
Of the lion’s paw. Vacancies, all
Vivid! Where conch gongs trumpeted
Afternoons of disenchantment,
Poinciana-hosannas of departure,

I set the bare-scoured skull
Of the loggerhead seaward
And at daybreak, when the iron
Ladle of the eastern sky oozed its
Apricot-bold fissures of day,
Scathing water poured
From the eyes of the skull.
Black sockets wept the sea.

Eric Ormsby. Originally published in For a Modest God, 1997. Included in Time’s Covenant, 2007.

Golden mantles ripple like tents before a storm
a surge of hot purple lays chests and feet bare
the cedar apostles raise their enormous heads
a beard dark as an ax hovers over the heights

The woodcarvers’ fingers bloom. A miracle eludes
their grasp so they grasp at air–stormy as strings
Stars grow turbid in the sky they make music too
but it doesn’t reach earth it stays high as the moon

And Mary falls asleep. She sinks to the bottom
of surprise. Tender eyes hold her in a fragile net
she falls upward as a stream runs through fingers
and they bend with effort over the building cloud

Zbigniew Herbert, 1990
(an impression of Wit Stwosz’ carved altarpiece in the Basilica Mariacka, Kraków)