Sunday 7 November 2010

31. Al-Kabir - Seed Potential


Suggests awareness, knowing, small, growth --- 'With every breath,
I plant the seeds of devotion. I am a farmer of the heart' ~ Rumi


The key
Trees are hunkered in the lane,
still, like stalking owls today;
winter dropped their old display,
now they hunch and crouch again.

But stony statues aren’t asleep,
working harder than the spring,
working up their flagrant song;
fiery cores transforming, deep.

An Eden Conception
A raindrop, unaccountably round,
plunges into Mallerstang;
Eden valley, Victorian dark,
the last great wilderness in England.

People come here briefly;
a monarch, a highwayman,
a thief, an earl, a tramp to see

rivers rise – the Ouse and Eden -
and if this raindrop falls an atom’s width
to the East, it runs to York;
a molecule West, Carlisle.
On and on, the future forks
and this drop will not travel both.

Race into a great valley;
ginger gorse: an undomesticated,
wild, wet second world, happy

when earth and wind decide
what’s right and left, that it’s worth
a surging newborn driving to
a source, a smash, a violent birth.

Rabbit

He likes to rabbit on, old Tony, giving all
and sundry gobfuls, earfuls, chatter
box, old Tony can’t half natter, talks
for England, verbal diarrhea.

Does it matter that he throws his words
out willy-nilly? Aren’t they just like seeds
or skimming stones or pips or dandelion clocks,
hoping one might stick like chucking pasta at a roof?

And Sigmund Freud, he knew
that smaller words will hold you;
id or ego,
if but try or is how no
just now so
me and
you.

3 comments:

  1. I make a point of checking out websites on twitter accounts I follow so I'm not sure how I missed this one. My loss, for sure. This is wonderful. The shift in tone, presumably as the narrator moves from giving us something in Tony's voice to commenting in his own, from 'talk' to thought, is impressive, as is the effect of moving from half embedded rhyme to end rhyme in the last verse, the tailing off of the small words that will hold us. It's all just perfect. And the Rumi is pretty nice too.

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  2. Sorry. That wasn't very clear. From the rhyme embedded in the lines - there's a term for that, I'm sure, but it slips my mind - and the half rhymes in the first verses to the the neat end rhymes of the last.

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  3. Smaller words can never hold me, for example, I, the smallest word, has been trying to hold me in vain, since my discovery of the whole process of identification.

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