Sword Blades and Poppy Seed | Page 7

yellow
ivory,
And a tassel of tarnished gold
Hung by a faded cord from a
hole
Pierced in the hard wood,
Circled with silver.
For years the
Poet had wrought upon this cane.
His wealth had gone to enrich it,

His experiences to pattern it,
His labour to fashion and burnish it.

To him it was perfect,
A work of art and a weapon,

A delight and a
defence.
The Poet took his walking-stick
And walked abroad.
Peace be with you, Brother.

The Poet came to a meadow.
Sifted through the grass were daisies,

Open-mouthed, wondering, they gazed at the sun.
The Poet struck
them with his cane.
The little heads flew off, and they lay
Dying,
open-mouthed and wondering,
On the hard ground.
"They are
useless. They are not roses," said the Poet.
Peace be with you, Brother. Go your ways.
The Poet came to a stream.
Purple and blue flags waded in the water;

In among them hopped the speckled frogs;
The wind slid through
them, rustling.
The Poet lifted his cane,
And the iris heads fell into
the water.
They floated away, torn and drowning.
"Wretched
flowers," said the Poet,
"They are not roses."
Peace be with you, Brother. It is your affair.
The Poet came to a garden.
Dahlias ripened against a wall,

Gillyflowers stood up bravely for all their short stature,
And a
trumpet-vine covered an arbour
With the red and gold of its blossoms.

Red and gold like the brass notes of trumpets.
The Poet knocked
off the stiff heads of the dahlias,
And his cane lopped the gillyflowers
at the ground.
Then he severed the trumpet-blossoms from their stems.

Red and gold they lay scattered,
Red and gold, as on a battle field;

Red and gold, prone and dying.
"They were not roses," said the
Poet.
Peace be with you, Brother.
But behind you is destruction, and waste
places.
The Poet came home at evening,
And in the candle-light
He wiped
and polished his cane.
The orange candle flame leaped in the yellow
ambers,
And made the jades undulate like green pools.
It played
along the bright ebony,
And glowed in the top of cream-coloured
ivory.
But these things were dead,
Only the candle-light made them
seem to move.
"It is a pity there were no roses," said the Poet.

Peace be with you, Brother. You have chosen your part.
The Coal Picker
He perches in the slime, inert,
Bedaubed with iridescent dirt.
The
oil upon the puddles dries
To colours like a peacock's eyes,
And
half-submerged tomato-cans
Shine scaly, as leviathans
Oozily
crawling through the mud.
The ground is here and there bestud

With lumps of only part-burned coal.
His duty is to glean the whole,

To pick them from the filth, each one,
To hoard them for the
hidden sun
Which glows within each fiery core
And waits to be
made free once more.
Their sharp and glistening edges cut
His
stiffened fingers. Through the smut
Gleam red the wounds which will
not shut.
Wet through and shivering he kneels
And digs the slippery
coals; like eels
They slide about. His force all spent,
He counts his
small accomplishment.
A half-a-dozen clinker-coals
Which still
have fire in their souls.
Fire! And in his thought there burns
The
topaz fire of votive urns.
He sees it fling from hill to hill,
And still
consumed, is burning still.
Higher and higher leaps the flame,
The
smoke an ever-shifting frame.
He sees a Spanish Castle old,
With
silver steps and paths of gold.
From myrtle bowers comes the plash

Of fountains, and the emerald flash
Of parrots in the orange trees,

Whose blossoms pasture humming bees.
He knows he feeds the urns
whose smoke
Bears visions, that his master-stroke
Is out of dirt and
misery
To light the fire of poesy.
He sees the glory, yet he knows

That others cannot see his shows.

To them his smoke is sightless,
black,
His votive vessels but a pack
Of old discarded shards, his fire

A peddler's; still to him the pyre
Is incensed, an enduring goal!

He sighs and grubs another coal.
Storm-Racked
How should I sing when buffeting salt waves
And stung with bitter
surges, in whose might
I toss, a cockleshell? The dreadful night


Marshals its undefeated dark and raves
In brutal madness, reeling
over graves
Of vanquished men, long-sunken out of sight,
Sent
wailing down to glut the ghoulish sprite
Who haunts foul seaweed
forests and their caves.
No parting cloud reveals a watery star,
My
cries are washed away upon the wind,
My cramped and blistering
hands can find no spar,
My eyes with hope o'erstrained, are growing
blind.
But painted on the sky great visions burn,
My voice, oblation
from a shattered urn!
Convalescence
From out the dragging vastness of the sea,
Wave-fettered, bound in
sinuous, seaweed strands,
He toils toward the rounding beach, and
stands
One moment, white and dripping, silently,
Cut like a cameo
in lazuli,
Then falls, betrayed by shifting shells, and lands
Prone in
the jeering water, and his hands
Clutch for support where no support
can be.
So up, and down, and forward, inch by inch,
He gains upon
the shore, where poppies glow
And sandflies dance their little lives
away.
The sucking waves retard, and tighter clinch
The weeds
about him, but the land-winds blow,
And in the sky there blooms the
sun of May.
Patience
Be patient with you?
When the stooping sky
Leans down upon the
hills
And tenderly, as one who soothing stills
An anguish, gathers
earth to lie
Embraced