A rising tide will always lift some boats.
Alien to the wine-dark of the bay,
That sea of plastic trash afloat today.
Tectonic plates are groaning as we speak;
Earth's on the move—the oceans leak.
Our lithosphere's become a tattered coat.
And I, poor I, who'd love to hold my peace,
Have still a lot more words left in my lease.
So, then, I wonder, What's to do?
I fear I'll have to leave it up to you!
Tuesday, December 3, 2024
Updated: Dec 10, 2024
At Gulliver's tomb in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin
"O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!"*
It’s admitting muteness that one hates,
and the jockeys at the gates,
mounted monkeys—bad, bad, bad—
who drove us mad.
It’s admitting muteness that one hates.
Hansom cabs I don't recall.
How awful, to go there at all!
It's a monody that grates.
It’s admitting muteness . . . that one hates.
At Salonika, she had to learn
(in World War I)
the wage is oats, that horses earn.
It’s admitting muteness that one hates,
and the harnesses we face,
plucked from those untrammeled states
intrinsic to this bunch of grace.
H-O-U-Y-H-N-H-N-M
* "O slowly, run slowly, horses of the night!"—Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1592–93).
Ever since first reading this tremendous line (quoted by Marlowe from a very different context in Ovid's Amores) at my high school, the Hoërskool De Aar—over seventy years ago—I've itched to quote it, and now here's another opportunity.
December 1, 2024
Ok
The sands are shifting as you walk; walk on,
The new is an emptier darkness than the old.
—Empson
Empson was wrong in his second line:
The new darkness is in itself a universe
Of dark energy, dark matter, and dark time,
In which the desperate stars rehearse
A first act of heat and warmth and life,
Where sapients stumble, bad to worse.
(In mushroom shrouds a monkey wields a knife,
Hurling at some fellow apes a curse.)
What it all signifies is more than we can know,
Which doesn’t mean that we're not free to guess.
Perhaps dark time itself might have it so!
If dark matter flattered, would dark energy confess?
Epigraph: William Empson, “Letter II,” in Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935).
Note: “Dark energy and dark matter constitute 95% of the total mass–energy content [of the universe].”—https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter.