Compass

Prelude

The finest quill-feather of a rain-spit drizzle
writes of a soft day that yet has tallest grasses flat,
such a delicate tangle of desolation -
the silvered, quick blades among the dead.

Peg-laddered, burly twigs of pear tree,
stripped of rosy autumn, are overwintering-spring:
buds robust and well-sealed need no sympathy
and I, though Limboed,  am at as much peace.

For, it's only when we are lost at times like children
leaping on a board,  no future reconnoitred,
that present wave may dash our front teeth out
in such surprise-dismay as ever tragedy forgot
its limitations in some great, impulsive gleam. 

Somehow we mostly know we're waiting,
in part of us, for the usual calamities
revealing patterns scratched in our skins.*
Press on, press on; though something presses
on a nerve.
_________We shrug and quite deliberately
ignore tomorrow, for today is hearty meal enough
for those that fill their bellies in tranquility,

not dying in some futile token of our care,
no shelter nor no food allotted,
the baby crying herself to corpse-hood,
maternal hopelessness our cold states sponsor.

Is it any cosmic comfort bright planets  will quicken
until the universe, one hundred trillion years hence,
is spent, while we watch this one sicken,

no grain to save a Sudanese refugee -
no one will lift a pen to fund and activate
the planes and lorries to deliver them?
_______________________________Syrians freeze
pinned to the edges of a European winter.

When all life's done the universe will be so far out
only Roger Penrose has a theory to tickle
that trout back to Finnegan, begin again.

Yet every day, as Stevie* says,
we are further out than thought.

Sigh and return to where the apples hang
and the apples lie,
for fungi, bacteria, bird and bug.

A little beetle lost his fumbling way
though, oh, so confusing air,
I snort away from nostril and observe
as on the table straightens his tuxedo up
and off goes, hiccuped up on drunken wings...

And I must top and tail the week
to set off much more soberly,
loaded with children, to visit my dear mother down
on November's very brinks.

...................

*Kafka - 'In the Penal Colony'
*Stevie Smith - 'Not Waving But Drowning'