Axis & Allies
(AA) Canto 81: Arunachala
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The pyramids have been eroded by the desert wind, the marble broken by earthquakes, & the gold stolen by robbers, while the Veda remains, recited daily by an unbroken chain of generations, traveling like a great wave thro’ the living substance of mind
Jean Le Mee
Civilisations
This evening walk deserves a poem.
A plane gleaming over the suburbs
Sinks into the bluish dusk
Semezdin Mehmedinović
As truck on truck announced wide cityscape,
With glassy towers scraping hazy sky,
I hoped immediately to escape,
The modern world where monies multiply;
Where east meets west
This valley silicon
Like some ten-headed beast born for Armageddon.
A whirl of British companies,
Thought it better to offload
Its highly taxed dependencies
Sending British jobs abroad
Computerised communities
Spread down the KH road
Eye of the vortex that is man’s progress –
Sports complexes, xerox & western dress.
As I tried to leave the city
The streets were cramm’d gridlock,
Grimy, gritty, slimy, shitty,
Til well past eight o clock
A vision of commuter hell, confusing Ragnaraok.
Bangalore
December
2008
Kerala
Carry my soul to the tented
Gypsy mystic, tinted, scented,
Take it to be finger-printed
Reza Mohammadi
Thro’ groves of coconut boles we venture,
To stand where epic Lusiad lay ceased,
Fisher village where Vasco de Gama
First sank renaissance gaze upon the East;
Further along
I find a fair city,
Furnish’d with friendly throng & AC library.
They palanquin’d embassadours
Thro’ crowds wide-eyed & gawping,
Depositing those pale litters
At the ring’d toes of their king,
Decadent Zamorin glitters,
What did these envoys bring?
Strange instruments of medicine & war,
The winds of trade blown to his spicy shore.
The latest one-dayer play’d out
Twixt England & our hosts,
Sehwag bowl’d out, my single shout
A meal of lonely toasts…
Flintoff fires off the final runs…clientelle fade like ghosts.
Calicut
December
2008
Hippy
Ten days of peacocks, none dare speak,
From sitting legs-cross’d on cool floor
My knees groan aching as they creak
Angelica Freitas
Sailing between these tranquil backwaters,
Palm-fring’d horizon burst all around me,
Before this treasure gold of Kerala’s
All made to stand in stark humility,
For scenes like these
Reveal wond’rous nature –
We slipt with sweeten’d ease into Kollam harbour.
The beatnik & his blues guitar
Stumbl’d on this perfect place,
Clift portion of the Malabar;
Sand, ocean, sun & solace,
But secrets are soon scatter’d far,
The Western tourists race
To plant their towel standards on the beach
Round which limpet rest’rants & hotels leech.
I dined with maid Slovenian,
Talk’d art, Trieste & Rome,
Slow flirtation! Our supper done
I walk’d her half-way home,
To make love midst the wave-breaks while the moonbeams snaked the foam.
Varkala
December
2008
Three Seas
When you go, space closes over like water behind you,
Do not look back: there is nothing outside you,
Space is only time visible in a different way
Ivan V. Lalić
At last the Ghats have peter’d to their end,
Sole, savage witch-peaks all which now remain,
Until we reach the grand Cormarin bend
Where ends Amritsar’s forty-eight hour train;
Join’d eclectic
In one wylde, chopping squall
Waves from the Antarctic, Araby & Bengal.
Ashes scatter’d on ocean stream,
Last remains of Mahatma,
Opponent of London’s regime
Nurtured in South Africa,
Returning preaching freedom’s dream
With soft satyahara –
This half naked fakir’s staff thin & long
Ensorcell’d his multitudinous throng.
Ghandi guides a blood red bindi
To rest upon the line
Slipping slowly into the sea,
The sky an evening wine,
I turn left face, step forth for North & Himalayan pine.
Kanayakamari
December
2008
Tamil Nadu
It has no name; silence is its name.
In the nothing, becoming nothing,
begetting nothing; this is everything
Chris Abani
I winch in each pinch of a varied view,
Shaking to this train’s novelty suspense,
After six sardine hours I’m plunged into
Some busy little city street intense;
Here to sample
Some scene which I was told,
India’s best temple bosom’d in urban fold.
The heart of the Dravidian
Fell to Vijiyanagar,
Who built a Hindu pantheon
Taller than its rising star,
Each kaleidoscopic mountain
Melodic without par,
Enough to urge grown women shed their tears,
Still painted heavenly ev’ry twelve years.
Opium! Coleridgean wish
Heeded by bloodshot man,
Dark, oily dish, crunch… ‘What is this?
Liquerice!…’ My mind’s span
Blew interspatial round the room as thought flew with the fan.
Madurai
December
2008
Indiana Byron
In a small side room appears
a broken-armed statue of Ganesh.
Touching the crumbled marble
Tiziana Colusso
Gorgeous Coromandel, crown prince of coasts,
My wanderlust has earn’d thine ancyent treats,
Meagre are glimpses of the Gallic ghosts
Dwelt within this grid of well ponder’d streets;
An antique chair,
Deep tann’d Gendarmerie,
All that retains the air transported from Paris.
Discovering rare poetry
Is the poet’s shooting star,
Like at Kannayakamari
Where stands Thiruvallavar,
Sri Aurobino’s Savitri,
On grand, Miltonic par,
Words wonderful, more wondrous to behold
Than Cortez did with Moctezuma’s gold.
I wafted in on inland scent
& left by soft, sea breeze,
Before I went…bemustach’d gent…
“A cool kingfisher please!”
I nearly piss’d myself when he hiss’d, “Thirty six rupees!”
Pondicherry
December
2008
Mystic Mountain
While his staff the traveller handles
In his weary journeying,
Thorns may tear his dusty sandals
TG Spear
As busses thunder over Tamil plains
I wonder why my muse has brought me here
Until, out of the misty monsoon rains,
Strange, solitary mountain-scapes appear;
Them mystic climb
& one especially
Inspires my mind to rhyme & find good poetry
“Arunachala rising red
Mountain of sacred musing,
Upon thy peak I’ll make a bed
& there with future fusing
I’ll sing the visions in my head
Happily perusing
Thro’ all the written scrolls of things to come
Such as… Chyren took Greece from Pergamum!”
I snapp’d out of that sayer-trance
& stept down from the bus
Into a handsome human dance
Of poori, fruit & fuss,
& faced the mountain as Saint Paul first sail’d from Ephesus
Thiruvannamali
December
2008
Lingamica
it is with joy that I sit
here. It is life I hold dear
in the ordinary quiet
Sally Nacker
As I ascend those smooth, bouldering slopes
My spiritus smouldering with desire
All history & all my heartfelt hopes
Kindle fresh sparks of man’s immortal fire;
My lips slow parch
As patterns they rehearse,
The long resounding march of old, heroic verse.
I have reach’d the sacred summit
Oer Thiruvannamali,
With the inkpen of the poet
& a modus of Magi,
Awaiting some untroubl’d fit
Those Deities supply,
To gently come into my feeble breast
& this falconic flight feel it infest.
I sat cross-legged, folded arms,
My third eye opens wide,
Beyond the farms, Pondy’s gendarmes,
The Bay of Bengal’s glide,
Then visions drive deep into space t’where sayer-stars abide.
Tamil Nadu
December
2008
Annagalactica
Fashioned to carry the world,
Satisfied with the shape of my nose,
Which should breathe all the air of the World
Bernard Dadié
Peering deep into planetary shift
Blisses man’s mind with Anaxagoras
Seeing events as they sway wide & drift
Thro happening’s full unexpectedness;
Pelagius
Defined the same seer-tricks
As divine Dante does descrying Beatrix.
& so, as strands of time converge,
On a space up in the spheres
Strange visions of events emerge
Far across the span of years
That flicker to & fro & surge
Til nearer each appears –
Strange omens of Jehova & the Beast
& that last battle in the Middle East.
When all these scenes eclampsian
Are driven off by dawn
Some laurel-mantl’d dragoman
On Siva’s sacred throne,
Etching grand mythopoeics, an epic hath turn’d to stone.
Arunachala
(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
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