(AA): L’Altoparnasso
What has been may be again: another Homer, & another Virgil, may possibly arise from those very causes which produced the first
John Dryden
Olympiads
All that mortal man possesses
has mortality & passes;
everything goes hurrying past
Lucian
The age of frigging empire is over,
The time for global harmony arriv’d,
World flocks to Heathrow, Stanstead & Dover
For here the truce Olympic has survived;
Among the crowd
Three blood-lines in a row,
Of native athletes proud, watching the discuss throw…
While Stiltskis cheer for young Ukraine
The Sumners cheer for Britain,
& for their blond, Aryan mane,
The Stemmler clan still smitten,
All share the surge, & there obtain
Phrenzies long verboten,
For only in the realms of friendly sport
Our ancient tribal urgencies now fought.
Amidst the Stratford stratosphere
All nations’ banners fly,
A final cheer, a tiny tear
Swells in old Tommy’s eye
For this is what he’d fought for, for the friends he’d once seen die.
London
2012
Turning Forty
My tale was heard, & yet it was not told;
My fruit is fall’n, & yet my leaves are green;
My youth is spent, & yet I am not old
Chidiock Tichborne
I’ve read we Poets twenty years should spend
Upon their epics, mine took just fifteen,
Eleven for to find its natural end
& four to polish, punctuate & clean;
Fulfilling fate
I settl’d in the North,
On Roseberry’s estate beside the Frisian Forth.
Last stroll I took, thro’ bluebell woods,
On our fern-life’s fairy frond,
Burst butterflies from bubbling buds
By the Younger’s gorgeous pond,
To sing, like Templars under hoods,
My song, here & beyond,
In summer sun, yet rising, still alive;
Soon all is done, aye, in a line or five.
While sat amidst the garden joys
That are my task’s reward,
With perfect poise my muse employs
This moment, soul-restor’d,
I’ll cast my pen in level lake like Arthur’s Elfen sword.
Baro Farm
May 31st
2016
Swansong
In the pursuit of learning one knows more every day:
in the pursuit of the way one does less every day.
One does less & less until one does nothing at all
Lao-Tzu
‘Twas Coleridge who said spend twenty years
On forming epic poems full evolv’d;
As such, the dateline of my blessing nears,
To canonize its worth on Earth resolv’d;
Fletching anew,
Four years pass’d since last I
Pen rested, cast into my living lullaby.
I sense the trials & the joys
Closer coming more & more,
No longer nimble with the boys
On the burst of forty-four,
This hiking heel no more enjoys
Its Viking matador,
On porcelain mornings tingling with doubt,
Besprinkling middle-ageing with the gout!
But ibuprofen serves the cause
As paracetamol
Puts pains on pause, the plain outdoors
The place I best extol
These passion-rites of poetry, la libertie l’ecole.
Edinburgh
July 8th
2020
Raison D’Etre
After distant lakes of mercury
Let us see the peaks at last,
See the ragged shores of Thessaly!
Gilles Ortleib
Within a planey cage I ranged aloft,
T’where fair Orpheus nature’s music sought,
Same sunny space in Thrace where last left off
My tours of Greece, with a Muses escort;
My pen compell’d
Shall end this epic lay,
Far from the Saxon feld, half-way to Mandalay.
Our destines are as the sun
Which rises at the dawning,
Unstoppable, once we’ve begun
Our progress through life’s morning:
When only half the day is done,
Sudden, without warning,
We find our brightest face begin to fade
The death-mask of a midnight’s masquerade.
The time shall come when Humankind,
Should look back on these lines
& in them find the trace of mind
Which raced off with the wines,
Like tasty Xinomavro modern Macedon designs.
Thessalonika
July 25th
2020
Samothraki
Here the free spirit of mankind, at length
Throws its last fetters off; & who shall place
A limit to the giant’s unchained strength
William Cullen Bryant
My boat departs, Alexandroupoli
Disappears as if Ardrossan leaving;
Ahead, a mountain spear’s tip strikes the sky,
Cloth’d in hoary forest dark upheaving;
My notebook breath’d
& flutter’d in the breeze,
Its makar, laurel-wreath’d, partaken & at ease.
With breakfast done the climb began,
Force following the shadow
Of something more than that young man
Who this started years ago,
From path-to-rock I laugh’d & ran,
The joyous gjggalo,
“This way…” beam’d Clio & Calliope
Perch’d on steep stone, strumming ukulele.
He dove into that perfect pool
With bed of Autumn leaves,
Sat on a stool of granite cool,
In elegance receives
One final line of poetry, what tapestry he weaves!
The Source of the Gria Vathra
August 21st
2020
Last Lap
Who owns this landscape?
Has owning anything to do with love?
For it & I have a love affair, so nearly human
Norman MacCaig
I’d sailed to Arran in a fit of change
Convers’d with nursemaid muses one-by-one
Excepting Calliope, she’d seem’’d strange
Aloof, perchance, distant, or even gone;
Eight hundred days
Oer paradise I stride
Exploring pathless ways, Demeter at my side.
My casement of creation peels
Off layers recent rusted
As light again quills feathers feel
The ink pot dried & dusted
As shaking off my hermes heels
crustacean encrustted
I burst from stagnant pool’d oblivion
To see the rising of a New Year sun.
In each Olympic year I’d seen
A surge of epic verse,
When thoughts convene to float Hellene
Oer rhythms rich & terse,
In future days of industry my quilling must traverse.
Brodick
July
2023
Finishing Line
All about me
Is heaven in all directions,
I love you, bright infinite space
J.A.Schade
Monastic for one full & final Year,
I work’d on the expansion of my task,
When World War Two would once more reappear,
Upon the page thro’ Calliope’s mask;
One special noon
Of Twenty Twenty Four
Beckon’d by Clio’s tune I clos’d Fell View’s back door.
Back to my task return’d I then,
All my muses still at play,
Off cycl’d to that sacred glen
With a brewdog IPA,
Transcending up a spinal zen
This was the final day
Of friendship in my penship, to compose
This sister epic of the Silver Rose.
I started once to end it all,
The bridge at Garvel Burn,
Whose waterfall with float, with roll,
Did drop & chop & churn –
With that, I truly say adieu, words duly to adjourn.
Glen Rosa
August 30th
2024
Home Straight
Those of the poets who were passing
would be found about your greensward;
far & wide have travellers spread your fame
Eachann Bacach
With one last stint to span this glinting year,
I’d sparkle as a poet overseas,
This key component of my soul’s career,
Where gushing poesie never seems to ease;
A bubbling brook,
Flows thick as Tehpig blood,
Congealing in a book, as proper epic should.
To Kaunas, Lithuania,
& Vilnius enchanting,
A tramp around Calabria
With Stesichorus; panting
Awe, saw I Stassi, Matera –
Then, my gallivanting,
Return’d to Malta’s national library,
Valetta-set, & yet, still, Italy
Forth-summon’d me, her bridal groom
The Euganean Hills
For Petrarch’s tomb, in late March gloom,
Travers’d where Alpine Heaven spills
waters thro’ Po’s delta.
Italy
March
2025
Finalmente!
It had come at last! his own stupendous hour
Long waited, dreaded, almost hoped-for too,
When all else seem’d the foolery of power
Max Plowman
Nigh twenty-seven years since I set out
Upon the Day of Fools, Livorno bound
My poem over, but for the final shout,
One primal-tinted, vinyl-minted sound;
Into the waves
From Adriatic shells,
“What path the poet paves!” from bonny Tunbridge Wells,
My poem moved thro’ Europe first,
Then flew to India,
When, to my trust, return’d the thirst
Renew’d, my lusty vigour,
For human history, immers’d
In verses, the trigger
Calliope squeezes every single time
She wish’d to hear me utter flutter-rhyme.
Like butterlies, farfale too,
Cast in a tryptych mould,
Thro’ which I drew this world into
A pitcher full of gold,
In which I sang the end of wars, that curs’d the earth of old.
Lido di Dante
March 30th
2025
Mumble Words 