"spiring" poems
BLESSED be this place,
More blessed still this tower;
A ****** arrogant power
Rose out of the race
Uttering, mastering it,
Rose like these walls from these
Storm-beaten cottages --
In mockery I have set
A powerful emblem up,
And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
In mockery of a time
HaIf dead at the top.
Alexandria's was a beacon tower, and Babylon's
An image of the moving heavens, a log-book of the
sun's journey and the moon's;
And Shelley had his towers, thought's crowned powers
he called them once.
I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare
This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my
ancestral stair;
That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke
have travelled there.
Swift beating on his breast in sibylline frenzy blind
Because the heart in his blood-sodden breast had
dragged him down into mankind,
Goldsmith deliberately sipping at the honey-pot of his
mind,
And haughtier-headed Burke that proved the State a
tree,
That this unconquerable labyrinth of the birds, cen-
tury after century,
Cast but dead leaves to mathematical equality;
And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a
dream,
That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its
farrow that so solid seem,
Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its
theme;
Saeva Indignatio and the labourer's hire,
The strength that gives our blood and state magnani-
mity of its own desire;
Everything that is not God consumed with intellectual
fire.
III
The purity of the unclouded moon
Has flung its atrowy shaft upon the floor.
Seven centuries have passed and it is pure,
The blood of innocence has left no stain.
There, on blood-saturated ground, have stood
Soldier, assassin, executioner.
Whether for daily pittance or in blind fear
Or out of abstract hatred, and shed blood,
But could not cast a single jet thereon.
Odour of blood on the ancestral stair!
And we that have shed none must gather there
And clamour in drunken frenzy for the moon.
IV
Upon the dusty, glittering windows cling,
And seem to cling upon the moonlit skies,
Tortoiseshell butterflies, peacock butterflies,
A couple of night-moths are on the wing.
Is every modern nation like the tower,
Half dead at the top? No matter what I said,
For wisdom is the property of the dead,
A something incompatible with life; and power,
Like everything that has the stain of blood,
A property of the living; but no stain
Can come upon the visage of the moon
When it has looked in glory from a cloud.
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In the rectory garden on his evening walk
Paced brisk Father Shawn. A cold day, a sodden one it was
In black November. After a sliding rain
Dew stood in chill sweat on each stalk,
Each thorn; spiring from wet earth, a blue haze
Hung caught in dark-webbed branches like a fabulous heron.
Hauled sudden from solitude,
Hair prickling on his head,
Father Shawn perceived a ghost
Shaping itself from that mist.
'How now,' Father Shawn crisply addressed the ghost
Wavering there, gauze-edged, smelling of woodsmoke,
'What manner of business are you on?
From your blue pallor, I'd say you inhabited the frozen waste
Of hell, and not the fiery part. Yet to judge by that dazzled look,
That noble mien, perhaps you've late quitted heaven?'
In voice furred with frost,
Ghost said to priest:
'Neither of those countries do I frequent:
Earth is my haunt.'
'Come, come,' Father Shawn gave an impatient shrug,
'I don't ask you to spin some ridiculous fable
Of gilded harps or gnawing fire: simply tell
After your life's end, what just epilogue
God ordained to follow up your days. Is it such trouble
To satisfy the questions of a curious old fool?'
'In life, love gnawed my skin
To this white bone;
What love did then, love does now:
Gnaws me through.'
'What love,' asked Father Shawn, 'but too great love
Of flawed earth-flesh could cause this sorry pass?
Some ****** condition you are in:
Thinking never to have left the world, you grieve
As though alive, shriveling in torment thus
To atone as shade for sin that lured blind man.'
'The day of doom
Is not yest come.
Until that time
A crock of dust is my dear hom.'
'Fond phantom,' cried shocked Father Shawn,
'Can there be such stubbornness--
A soul grown feverish, clutching its dead body-tree
Like a last storm-crossed leaf? Best get you gone
To judgment in a higher court of grace.
Repent, depart, before God's trump-crack splits the sky.'
From that pale mist
Ghost swore to priest:
'There sits no higher court
Than man's red heart.'
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The clouds as I see them, rising
urgently, roseate in the
mounting of somber power
surging in evening haste over
roofs and hermetic
grim walls—
Last night
As if death had lit a pale light
in your flesh, your flesh
was cold to my touch, or not cold
but cool, cooling, as if the last traces
of warmth were still fading in you.
My thigh burned in cold fear where
yours touched it.
But I forced to mind my vision of a sky
close and enclosed, unlike the space in which these clouds move—
a sky of gray mist it appeared—
and how looking intently at it we saw
its gray was not gray but a milky white
in which radiant traces of opal greens,
fiery blues, gleamed, faded, gleamed again,
and how only then, seeing the color in the gray,
a field sprang into sight, extending
between where we stood and the horizon,
a field of freshest deep spiring grass
starred with dandelions,
green and gold
gold and green alternating in closewoven
chords, madrigal field.
Is death’s chill that visited our bed
other than what it seemed, is it
a gray to be watched keenly?
Wiping my glasses and leaning westward,
clearing my mind of the day’s mist and leaning
into myself to see
the colors of truth
I watch the clouds as I see them
in pomp advancing, pursuing
the fallen sun.
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BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with metry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Joves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.
Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile.
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For ill things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.
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CORTÉS
Trailblazing pioneers, God’s harbingers:
The shining daylight of the Renaissance
Now swiftly dissipates the blindfold gloom
Of this benighted, dark, and iron age.
And as this dawn of culture greets the globe,
Our own Castile, of all the hosts of Europe,
Emerges as its greatest modern power.
If we receive the bounty of these lands,
So must we bear our duty to convert,
And shall redeem these hell-bound debutantes.
Coincidence?- That as the graceless Moors
Were drubbed and shunted from our Christian sands,
And in the very year our spiring cross
Eclipsed that toenail paring of a moon-
That new horizons opened in the west?
Do you not feel, my fresh adventurers,
That you are precious to the Lord, and chosen?
Strike sail! Exit.
ALVARADO You heard the captain. Up and at ‘em.
You porters, lash the tents to tame these winds.
The horsemen will untwine the provender. Exit Garrido.
SANDOVAL
The women must find tinder, turf, and fuel.
The sun is down. We race against the dusk. Exit María.
ESCUDERO
These heavy, gathering clouds have opened up,
And threaten to bestow unwanted gifts.
DÍAZ
It is the cyclone season out at sea.
SANDOVAL
Such scuddy weather bodes a sudden turn.
ALVARADO
Let’s hustle then to fumble up a camp,
And save our “oo-” and “ahh”ing for the dawn.
Exit all but Olmedo.
OLMEDO
Thus shall the ardent lights of Europe come,
And pour upon these newfound neophytes.
But will they be enlightening Catholic lamps,
Or a consuming fire to destroy them? Exit.
Oct 9, 2016
Oct 9, 2016 at 11:58 AM UTC
Fervently,
Aspiring my goals,
Candor I am,
Anticipating what I got,
Demonstration,
Evoking a thought.
Sep 27, 2015
Sep 27, 2015 at 6:26 AM UTC
I’ve always loved
The crane of green, of spiring atoms
Years in their making: the
Burdened, brittle backs of flowers in my garden.
These are the stems which are nothing but,
letting loose a leaf here that wonders then
Wilts; slung, there, sullen, at the side.
I’ve always admired
The ribald crags, a matter of mid-life
Crises. Yet, all about its warted middle
A uniform purpose nonetheless rises:
Dewy petals ringing white in halos,
Their fearless figures spread wide upon the air:
Indeed, all the supple self naked to the whim of Nature.
I’ve always enjoyed their grace.
Except, there is one bowing low, shut upon itself
And gray. I wonder how it came to be that way,
Still haloed in its ashen regalness.
Or, for that matter, how many more will
Slump before tomorrow, exchanging their halos
For a bit of rest.
Yes, I’ve always marveled at the uncanniness of flowers.
Jul 4, 2019
Jul 4, 2019 at 10:46 AM UTC