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WATCHING THE GOOD INTENTIONS: WATCH
(after the unchecked depredations of Boko Haram, Nigeria & Isis, Syria & Iraq)
Watching the baby good intentions so cute
at play in the lab-zoo of their own making
this heart fails me, more, as theirs do not,
for I observe the use of seeing-eye dogs
to sat-nav a wisdom of this repeat history
that mind-slavishly trusts its still-lying maps,
which paints the faces of the children, or
which makes music in benefit concerts, or
cycles across lands of emptying value, which
tours the globalised countries of the saved in the
ruined fact of damnation,and denies it, as it runs
to be fit, and does not foretell the carnage, not
of a dawnless day coming, the brute day of the locust
to come, the days of scavengers and vultures already
hatching like weeds in the bleed-lands of our neglect.
Elegy at the End of Mortal Day
- by Wayne David Knoll
Autumn's late green ache straws-off in pastures where
a congregation of wild white Ibis, some with sacred invest of
ruffles at the neck, in-gather wings like long-faced mourners
carrying the keen scimitars of their swords before them
in the paddocks of the (blanketed) living and the dead,
as their prey are, or likely soon will be. As all life feeds
on itself, so its end is ever before us, that sword; there, for all
who have it, for it is with us before we know we have it, and is
not other; before us, whether we are like this dank sky of clouds
that rue the last colours of a just-descended sun, as mere
fickle things of urgent chemistry and physics, else, transport
mind over the west of ends asking back east of our beginnings
In knowing that this longing, a love for breath we have, air upon
which the ibis takes wing, is given somehow as by a kind parent
who allows the vast polarities, this night, this far horizon breaking
slowly alight as the departure of light allows in the screen we call
darkness, with that absence that unroofs this small sky to draw
close in their immeasurable number the distances of the stars.
-9th June 2014
