"chessmen" poems
I
This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.
II
Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.
III
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers' declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
IV
Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
4.7k
War is not a game
to chessmen
pawned to death
but to the hands
that move them.
Apr 19, 2016
Apr 19, 2016 at 8:22 PM UTC
Iron man with his chessmen
Reinvent heretics for God's sake
Rational excuse aforesaid
Iron man with his chessmen
Wild flowers dancing to salute them
Drinking the blood after the game
Let me cherish thee this time
Never bartered you with victorious rime
Let me consecrate individuals with my light
You are your own conducting mind
Mar 18, 2017
Mar 18, 2017 at 10:35 AM UTC
Crepuscular creatures bow their heads to dusk,
Licking the blood of their wounds, the sun stanches
The thousand faces of the moon, waiting,
For our cries, trapped by the mountains in our west.
Hands have eyes gazing the desert of a sea,
Hands have their own odes, so don’t teach them.
Waves cradling their souls. Undulating darkness
stare at them face-to-face, black and cold.
In their town, fishes feed on lights,
While their people feed on winds, the amihan.
Fishes paraded, muted by embers of the coals.
Women, children, singing, waiting for men
to unload their boxes, those bañeras of golden fish scales,
Pull each fish, peel their scales gently, there
There, they hide.
Hide us in that box,
That rectangle of a box,
Our little box of threads and needles.
Stitch us on the seams,
Sink us under your sole,
Hide us in that barrels,
Distill our spirits,
Wash us pure. Age us,
Better yet,
Open our souls after the war.
War is not a game
among chessmen
pawned into death
but to the hands
that move them.
Apr 20, 2016
Apr 20, 2016 at 1:48 AM UTC
Complex,
but to the mind,
distance is no object,
if I am here and there
then I am everywhere.
An insecticide,
I can hide in, slide in
underneath your skin.
Disrupt the flow of signals to
your brain,
drain you of the will to live.
Multi ***
I am he and she and in me there
are many more, it
all checks out to me to be
more than complex
but in my mind,
I cannot object,
I only project the pictures that I see,
I keep my own and I own my self
and my
own company.
Complex.
Jan 16, 2015
Jan 16, 2015 at 8:15 PM UTC
***** fortresses and palaces
write tightest code
reach the pinnacle of artistry
painting raindrops
composing sublime orchestrations
from furrows where germinate
the double-helical zenith
of human engineering outside
nanotubes, transistors or
our private clouds—
all the emergent complexity
we've harvested in semantic grace
—to seem like life is comfortable
and tastes good and may actually
be worth something in the end;
yet, bloodied or coddled, chessmen
march on, moving into position
guided by the arbitrariness of their
quest, immune to the nuance
of getting caught in a summer rain,
hugs from your grandmother,
some memory of reciting Bible verses
in Sunday school, singing a hymn into
the depth of a passionate smooch
or the fancy of imagination's depression,
but the arrow of time points on!
And eclectic rumination notwithstanding,
etropy always wins.
Dec 30, 2016
Dec 30, 2016 at 10:18 PM UTC
Colours black,
fades
back
to white milk night.
Though blind of sight I
hear the falls,
the cataracts call in
colours black.,
On the board
knight backs night.
Checkmate
Right?
Feb 8, 2015
Feb 8, 2015 at 7:22 PM UTC
How difficult to rejoice when one hears
That those relatives against whose predations
Dead-bolts have been fitted on every door
Are visiting for Christmas after all
Let us rejoice that the nephews who pick locks
And break the windows in the garden shed
And ride the patio doors off their hinges
And pocket pewter chessmen for their play
Will be with us merrily once more
With their mothers – ‘tis the season to abhor
Dec 16, 2018
Dec 16, 2018 at 10:27 AM UTC