The White Tiger

By R.S. Thomas

It was beautiful as God
must be beautiful:
glacial eyes that had looked on
violence and come to terms 

with it; a body too huge
and majestic for the cage in which
it had been put; up
and down in the shadow 

of its own bulk it went
lifting, as it turned,
the crumpled flower of its face
to look into my own 

face without seeing me. It
was the colour of the moon
light on snow and as quiet
as moonlight, but breathing 

as you can imagine that
God breaths within the confines
of our definition of him, agonizing
over immensities that will not return.

Ghostcamp

BY PETER TROWER

A lot of loggers hide dead in these hills
setting chokers eternally
on healed slopes above brush-choked landings
where rusting steampots
crouch sphinxlike and voiceless
and corroded snake cables
twist paralyzed among the ferns
with motion, a steel memory.

In the empty camp that lies
half-ransacked at the northern mouth
of this ransacked valley,
we stand thoughtful among ruin
ancient bull-blocks
sleep like giant turtles in the weeds
heavy two-man powersaws
lie forever unmended in sheds.

Garages full of obsolete bearings
abandoned anvils
blacksmiths and mechanics gone
to whatever random destiny.
The gutted bunkhouse guards echoes
fled dreams of drifted men
with few dreams. The cookshack
guthammer hasn’t clanged for years.

I have come full circle –
across the inlet lies Misery Creek
where my brother and I watched camp
one fireseason summer two decades back.
The dead camp sprawls around us.
I can’t speak. It’s too strange.
Log long enough, you’re bound to stumble
across your own bootprints in the end.

On the Death of Jim Larkin

Patrick Kavanagh

The statue of Jim Larking on O’Connell Street, Dublin.

Not with public words now can his greatness
Be told to the children, for he was more
Than a labour-agitating orator —
The flashing flaming sword merely bore witness
To the coming of the dawn. ‘Awake and look!
The flowers are growing for you, and wonderful trees,
And beyond are not the serf’s grey docks, but seas —
Excitement out of the creator’s poetry book.

When the Full Moon’s in the River the ghost of bread
Must not haunt all your weary wanderings home.
The ships that were dark galleys can become
Pine forests under the winter’s starry plough
And the brown gantries will be the lifted hand
Of man the dreamer whom the gods endow.’

And thus I hear Jim Larkin shout above
The crowd who wanted him to turn aside
From Reality coming to free them. Terrified
They hid in the clouds of dope and would not move.
They ate the opium of the murderer’s story
In the Sunday newspapers; they stood to stare
Not at a blackbird, but at a millionaire
Whose horses ran for serfdom’s greater glory.

And Tyranny trampled them in Dublin’s gutter,
Until Larkin came along and cried
The call of Freedom and the call of Pride,
And Slavery crept to its hands and knees,
And Nineteen Thirteen cheered from out the utter
Degradation of their miseries.

Birth-Dues

BY ROBINSON JEFFERS

Robinson Jeffers working with stones in Tor House yard, 1930s.

Joy is a trick in the air; pleasure is merely
    contemptible, the dangled
Carrot the ass follows to market or precipice;
But limitary pain — the rock under the tower
    and the hewn coping
That takes thunder at the head of the turret-
Terrible and real. Therefore a mindless dervish
    carving himself
With knives will seem to have conquered the world.

The world’s God is treacherous and full of
    unreason; a torturer, but also
The only foundation and the only fountain.
Who fights him eats his own flesh and perishes
    of hunger; who hides in the grave
To escape him is dead; who enters the Indian
Recession to escape him is dead; who falls in
    love with the God is washed clean
Of death desired and of death dreaded.

He has joy, but Joy is a trick in the air; and
    pleasure, but pleasure is contemptible;
And peace; and is based on solider than pain.
He has broken boundaries a little and that will
estrange him; he is monstrous, but not
To the measure of the God…. But I having told
    you—
However I suppose that few in the world have
    energy to hear effectively-
Have paid my birth-dues; am quits with the
    people.

Birds in the Wind

BY GLENN WARD DRESBACH

From:

A Voice from the Edge

for Pat Lowther

BY PETER TROWER

I will never forget your voice
on that last day of your days
it ghosted over the phone like audible darkness
strained   sapped   utterly empty
bled of all hope   all joy
the merest echo of you
the voice of someone who faced
the naked unfaceable.

All the unwritten poems
lay stillborn in your brain
never to escape from you
like bright birds
never to slide again from your fingertips
full of wisdom   laughter   pain
never to scratch wonder
from the white waste of a page.

The sea   the woods   the mountains
you loved and celebrated
lay forever beyond your window now
your eyes would not kiss them again
you would become your children’s sorrow
in the dark stain of your going
you would become your photographs
the small unfinished legacy of your verse.

But I didn’t know   didn’t know
I thought I had somehow offended you
I turned the thing to myself
as I too often did then.
And I didn’t know  didn’t know
that yours was a voice from the edge
that a man corrupted by jealousy
stood at the door of your life
with his hand on the hammer.

Kelpy

Penelope Shuttle

nettles of the neighbourhood
sank down
rain was strewn for miles
the storm lasted seven days
and seven nights
flinging down matted maps
of the sodden heavens
it smelt
rocky and kelpy
its kraken roar rattled Lyonesse
like Rodin sorting through
his drawer of Legs and Hands –
then

            Zut!

away  went the storm to wherever storms go
for a change of scene
flinging back its bushy cloud hair
its cheveux touffus
leaving that ole home town
no better no worse
than a wishing well of weather

________________
From the cover of Lyonesse:

The submerged land of Lyonesse was once part of Cornwall, according to myth and the oral tradition, standing for a lost paradise in Arthurian legend, but now an emblem of human frailty in the face of climate change. And there was indeed a Bronze Age inundation event which swept the entire west of Cornwall under the sea, with only the Isles of Scilly and St. Michael’s Mount left as remnants above sea-level. Lyonesse was also Thomas Hardy’s name for Cornwall where Penelope Shuttle has lived all her adult life, always fascinated by the stories and symbolic presence of Lyonesse.

To Robinson Jeffers

Czeslaw Milosz

If you have not read the Slavic poets
so much the better. There’s nothing there
for a Scotch-Irish wanderer to seek. They lived in a childhood
prolonged from age to age. For them, the sun
was a farmer’s ruddy face, the moon peeped through a cloud
and the Milky Way gladdened them like a birch-lined road.
They longed for the Kingdom which is always near,
always right at hand. Then, under apple trees
angels in homespun linen will come parting the boughs
and at the white kolkhoz tablecloth
cordiality and affection will feast (falling to the ground at times).

And you are from surf-rattled skerries. From the heaths
where burying a warrior they broke his bones
so he could not haunt the living. From the sea night
which your forefathers pulled over themselves, without a word.
Above your head no face, neither the sun’s nor the moon’s,
only the throbbing of galaxies, the immutable
violence of new beginnings, of new destruction.

All your life listening to the ocean. Black dinosaurs
wade where a purple zone of phosphorescent weeds
rises and falls on the waves as in a dream. And Agamemnon
sails the boiling deep to the steps of the palace
to have his blood gush onto marble. Till mankind passes
and the pure and stony earth is pounded by the ocean.

Thin-lipped, blue-eyed, without grace or hope,
before God the Terrible, body of the world.
Prayers are not heard. Basalt and granite.
Above them, a bird of prey. The only beauty.

What have I to do with you? From footpaths in the orchards,
from an untaught choir and shimmers of a monstrance,
from flower beds of rue, hills by the rivers, books
in which a zealous Lithuanian announced brotherhood, I come.
Oh, consolations of mortals, futile creeds.

And yet you did not know what I know. The earth teaches
More than does the nakedness of elements. No one with impunity
gives to himself the eyes of a god. So brave, in a void,
you offered sacrifices to demons: there were Wotan and Thor,
the screech of Erinyes in the air, the terror of dogs
when Hekate with her retinue of the dead draws near.

Better to carve suns and moons on the joints of crosses
as was done in my district. To birches and firs
give feminine names. To implore protection
against the mute and treacherous might
than to proclaim, as you did, an inhuman thing.

Shine, Republic

BY ROBINSON JEFFERS

The quality of these trees, green height; of the sky, shining, of
water, a clear flow; of the rock, hardness
And reticence: each is noble in its quality. The love of freedom
has been the quality of Western man.

There is a stubborn torch that flames from Marathon to Concord,
its dangerous beauty binding three ages
Into one time; the waves of barbarism and civilization have
eclipsed but have never quenched it.

For the Greeks the love of beauty, for Rome of ruling; for the
present age the passionate love of discovery;
But in one noble passion we are one; and Washington, Luther,
Tacitus, Aeschylus, one kind of man.

And you, America, that passion made you. You were not born
to prosperity, you were born to love freedom.
You did not say ‘en masse,’ you said ‘independence.’ But we
cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also.

Freedom is poor and laborious; that torch is not safe but hungry,
and often requires blood for its fuel.
You will tame it against it burn too clearly, you will hood it
like a kept hawk, you will perch it on the wrist of Caesar.

But keep the tradition, conserve the forms, the observances, keep
the spot sore. Be great, carve deep your heel-marks.
The states of the next age will no doubt remember you, and edge
their love of freedom with contempt of luxury.
________________________

In his brilliant book, The Atom To Be Split: New and Selected Essays on Robinson Jeffers, referring to “Shine Republic” Robert Zaller writes:

“The core value of the West was, in Jeffers’ view, freedom, the reason and condition of its existence. Freedom had been the West’s “passion,” its “steep singleness,” but in the mass societies of abundance freedom could have no place. “The beauty of modern / Man,” Jeffers wrote in “Rearmament,” “is not in the persons but in the / Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the / Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.” In “The Purse-Seine,” he likened the populations of cities to fish trapped in a net, “incapable of free survival, insulated / From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent.” The very memory of freedom would wither in the wars of order:

Men will fight through to the autumn flowering and ordered
prosperity. They will lift their heads in the great cities
Of the empire and say: “Freedom? Freedom was a fire. We are
well quit of freedom, we have found prosperity.” (Hellenistics)

For the chorus of maskers in “The Bowl of Blood,” freedom is already a legend that belongs to a distant past and, perhaps, an imperceptible future:

I have heard a story about freedom, a vain vain tale
Told by some Greeks, by some slave-holding Greeks
And a few Roman authors …

                                                Freedom must wait.
This is the hour of masses and masters.

Canal Bank Walk

Patrick Kavanagh

Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.

The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.

O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
_______________________________

Patrick Kavanagh wrote “Canal Bank Walk” while convalescing from treatment for lung cancer in 1954. His deliverance from the grim reaper rejuvenated his passion for life and inspired this poem.