The Transitory Nature of Life

Wednesday, February 16, 2022

My son Joseph mentioned that in Japan, where he lives, ceramics are worth a great deal more if they are broken and then mended with gold filling. That led to me writing some lines in a Blues, as follows:

Yet the greatest thing I have to share

Is that love’s like china and oft needs repair

But if you mend each crack with melted gol

Its beauty increases for all to behold

Its beauty increases for all to behold

(Cracked China Blues)

At the heart of this is a reverence for how the transitory nature of life can be held up momentarily for inspection, while accepting the inevitable order of things.

I have been unlocking poems I wrote thirty or so years ago, refreshing and sprucing them up to meet the demands of my older eye. They deal with the same subject, though in a more direct. challenging way.

Passing

We make a mark in sand or snow to watch the tide 

Or sun erase our passing tracks

We press a finger on another’s cheek

To see the soft-red imprint, dull then fade

We lie upon the hothouse summer corn

To watch the stalks rebound upon our love

We sit upon the dry stone of a grave

And dampen it with thoughts of what will be

Spectres

Four events emerge 

Ghostly through the driving

Winter snow

A rabbit bobbling slow

With myxomatosis

Feeling blindly down a furrow

A dove dancing along a fence

Cooing, impotent, in the gale

A crow blunt-beaking frozen flesh

On a tree-hung corpse’s bone

Three acts

In play on nature’s stage 

Conjoined

By a fourth, 

An invisible trudging man 

The Three Legged Cow

Tuesday, February 8, 2022

What’s in a gift I ask of you?

Over my life I’ve received a few

But none to match my five year old joy

At receiving a gift from a miner’s boy

Of a brown lead cow with a leg short of four 

Which I carefully placed in my secret drawer

From then until now there’s been no repeat

It’s been lead in my heart with each gift’s receipt

The ones that made my heart go cold

Like a box of chocolates white with mould

Or socks that were more than a size too small

“I never realized you’d grown so tall”

Or a tee shirt with a motif I once desired

With the label: “Keep away from fire”

Or a prog rock vinyl, corners frayed

With scratches showing it’d already been played

Or a radio implanted in a knight’s vizored head

Whose kitschiness conspired to fill me with dread

Or those ‘perfect’ presents, so carefully thought

That somehow still amounted to nought

From birth to puberty to adult male

Birthdays and christmases left a trail

Of dashed expectations as hope ever dwindled

That those five year old’s feelings would ‘ere be rekindled

I never knew that that wondrous day

Would leave me this void I can never allay