Again the Grandeur

Again the Grandeur
by Gideon Burton

Again the grandeur, craggy canyon steep
with walled antiquity, with wintered time,
with pressures muted, violence in heaps
of silent folded rock face misaligned.
Again the cracking ashen dome whose wet
persistence chisels granite, limestone. Damp
with Autumns aggregating subtle threats
as Winters clutch the stones with icy clamps.
Again the slow erosion. Nothing holds
the crumbling running out of sandy night.
Despite the shivering toward a cold
conclusion, nothing, nothing shades that light
     That sun returning, shaking off the covers,
     The warming sky, the shuddering of lovers.

Photo: flickr - snowpeak

The Grandeur of God

The Grandeur of God
by Gideon Burton
after Gerard Manley Hopkins' "God's Grandeur"

I have been witness, watched his flowing robe
shake loose the western amber sky, condense
to moonlit dewdrop silence second sense,
the potent graces faced with open code:
the land in spans of grandeur, prairies sewn
in fertile fabric, folded gold. Why fence
against this surge of surplus awe? Dispense
with lesser rhythms, prices paid or owed,
attenuations worked by thinning toil.
Dig down, unbare the freshest deepest core,
unhide unspoken remnant promised peace,
the lease of dove's down skin stroked morning oil,
oh, holy ghosting flow of something more,
the springs uprushing, wings of dawn release.

Photo: flickr - Roger Smith

God's Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Turning in the Gyre

Turning in the Gyre
by Gideon Burton
after William Buter Yeats' "The Second Coming" (below)

Of things that fall apart, that cannot hold
their center; loosened anarchies, the tides
of bloodied time, of innocence that slides
its fathoms dark till frozen, dirty, old.
The best withdraw, or worse, to worst are sold,
and surely some conclusion will divide
this scene from seeing. Something died
to rigor mortis' feigning peace I'm told,
rough beast, whose thudding trunk has stunned the hour,
has from its desert lair in roaring anger
upheaved its widening maw and turns its mass
to strip Jerusalems of latent power,
to mock the weak who shield themselves from danger,
and slouches, scorching sands to ashy glass.

Photo: flickr - gartmann

The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Unleaving

Unleaving
by Gideon Burton
a response to Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Spring & Fall" (below)

Not grieving, no, though wistful at the haste
with which the paper leaf-gold scatters, bruised
with ruddy blushing once the crisping taste
of orange Autumn smacks the morning, fused
with musty rusts, with browning greens, with all
the sudden-subtle transformations stark
along the gilded leavings steeped in Fall.
And though the season leans toward the dark,
these worlds of wanwood leafmeal never lie,
but ever promise Sparrow Watcher heats
the coldest air with what can never die,
though guessing ghosts might spook their own retreat.
     This is the golden autumn birth we're born for:
     to so expire, there's nothing left to mourn for.


Spring & Fall
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Photo: flickr - kern.justin

Stompers, Humbled

Stompers, Humbled
by Gideon Burton

The Epsom salts assault my toe with heat,
the tender inflammation mutely screams
around my swollen toe. And worse, it seems
I'll never walk again, not with these feet.
Not ever normally and far less fleet.
(My poetry has had much better themes,
but love and such must wait within my dreams,
as I sit here in pain upon my seat.)
Some years ago I slipped and broke my toe.
I hobbled, limped and sobbed for countless weeks.
I paid my toe-pain dues, I learned my lesson.
How careless of me letting that nail grow,
as now the costly doctor I must seek!
With baby steps I'll walk off my depression.

Photo: flickr - Brother O'Mara

Gifts

Gifts
by Gideon Burton

“So much has been given to me, I have not time to ponder over that which has been denied.”

-- Helen Keller

Among the highest gifts He's given, these:
the absence of His richest, present being;
the silence of the speaking God; release
from certainty, from daylight's darkest seeing;
mundane and everyday in every day;
unanswered prayers, tears soaked into tears
spread over under inbetween the rays,
those sudden-quiet silences that spear
the swollen soggy sorry saddened fright
with peace unearned, with grace anointing eye
and ear and swollen knees and blurry sight
and staunching blasphemies no use to try.
     So much remains when all the rest elides;
     So many gifts through light that is denied.

Photo: flickr - mooste

Return to Dover Beach

Return to Dover Beach
by Gideon Burton
again, after Matthew Arnold

This darkling plain where struggling armies clash
and fight. These roaring tides whose sweep and flight
rake light to bruised confusion through the night.
No help, no love, no peace except the rash
array of ignorance that steams the salty, vast
incontinence of worlds this weak, this sleight.
No beauty, youth; no certain truth, just fright
and vacancy where deafened atoms smash.
Ah, love, beguiled by earth's variety,
bewitched by potent potions from the sea,
the washing, waving, purifying ocean --
be true to me. These stark impurities
unbuild the timbers that have steadied me,
and faith itself unweaves in murky motion.

Photo: flickr - Norbert Meffron

On Dover's Beach

On Dover's Beach
by Gideon Burton
after Matthew Arnold (see below)

Calm sea, full tide, fair moon upon the straits.
The cliffs of England standing vast and grand.
Come to the window, sweet the air that sprays
where -- look -- the glimmering sea meets moon-blanched land.
And listen, hear the grating pebbles roar
as waves draw back and fling them up the strand
in cadence slow, returning as before,
the same that Sophocles found sadly bland.
The Sea of Faith once folded-golden full
withdraws in melancholy moaning back,
so many pebbles roughened down to dull,
as night winds' naked edges sink to black.
     This darkling plain, this world, sans joy and light--
     My love, be true, for we are swept by night.

Photo: flickr - Stuart Hines

Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straights; -- on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Ready for Sleep

Ready for Sleep
by Gideon Burton

Against the leather atmosphere I press
A wrinkled face. Expiring daylight scrapes
The hours jaggedly into the west
Where grizzled clouds are hung like dirty drapes
In limp abandonment. Uneasy birds
Still rummage through the odd remainders of
The songs they have forgotten. Healing words
Grow thick and sour, fail to crest above
The briny fog engulfing waxy ears.
And who will watch the yellow-needled pines?
And who forgive the graying flowers' fears?
The sunset spills the earth with bloody winds.
     I watch the sinking, ready for a sleep
     As thorough as these seasons and as deep.
  

Photo: flickr - manfred-hartmann

Love in Four Seasons

Love in Four Seasons
by Gideon Burton

She whispered moistened trellises of breath
Against the skin of expectation. Seas
And currents, washing oceans may caress
The rounding pebbles into sand to please
the eons. But to me the petals wet
And white confess her touching them, enough
To lend her fingers pollen and regret
Perhaps–perhaps the taste of winter’s rough
Persuasions dormant in the thickened rain.
She reconciled the atmosphere’s delay
To ready poultices of music, strange
And supple on the spreading bruise of day
     She spoke to me in words, in water, all
     The seasons: summer yielding well to fall.