"The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on."*
I
You probably already know, William,
that it’s pretty much all the same
as when you paced the battlements
and howled to the indifferent stars
"It seems I must bid the Muse go pack!"
, caught in Passion’s cataract –
that torrent of emotive poetic grief.
II
Though politics have changed,
there's still old men in the Senate
who stare but don’t seem to see.
They’re caught in youthful daydreams ---
the girls’ bras’ are too hard to unclasp,
even when employing that agéd charm.
(“But O that I were young again
and held her in my arms!”)
You weren't an exception;
politicians are also subject to the Human Condition.
Perhaps more than a poet,
probably more than a poet.
So I guess you got the double dose, William.
In a split second the State slips,
staggers, and reinvents foreign policies,
only to double-back on itself again and reverse.
I know you remember those you rhymed out in verse:
MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly and Pearse;
their rifles still ring in the recesses
of the Public’s miasmic mind –
the haze just dissipated over the Irish Sea.
And it's the spring of 2012.
Gore-Booth and Markiewicz are but marrowless bones,
Collins as well.
His still mix in the grave –
They’ve been for ninety years.
Yeah, it's pretty much the same,
Synge’s ******* is still unpopular.
In fact, plays are largely unpopular,
and playwrights work in restaurants
where sweat lingers on their brows
to eventually drip into an already-unfit meal.
It's hard to imagine a play once
brought Dublin to riot;
you couldn't start a riot now if you had
thirty drunken anarchists
with two Molotovs a piece
watch Godwin’s grave get gutted.
Though information is more accessible,
it's an age of information-apathy.
You'd **** a shotgun to your temple
if you saw the state of education today.
I'm afraid, William, it's all the same:
the gyres still run on ---
I fear they're running out of breath.
III
But it’d be imbalanced to leave you here;
at least you split on a Saturday.
Late-January trembles each year,
as the earth did the day you were consumed
in Helen(“who all living hearts has betrayed”)
’s immutable embrace;
your heart alone she could not betray.
And blind Homer who sang her betrayals
has ceased; mouths ran dry the day you died.
You left before your trade imprisoned you;
before the pen enchanted
your remaining years to a page.
You left before you couldn’t:
before the blitzkrieg;
before the world lost ten million more Robert Gregory’s
and you died from exhaustion mid-rhyme on the seventh-stanza of the five-million eight-hundred and fifty-fourth
elegy.
Regardless, it's really all the same.
Even those beggars are still playing twister with their whip.
