The Grimoire

Baron Munchausen pulls himself and his horse out of a swamp by his own hair

Behind closed doors nine sheeted oracles interpret

the ancient book of spells bequeathed us

by step-forefathers whom we never knew.

Those gentlemen'd think us poltroons,

glimpsing the way we behave today!

Teasers once asked a Roman oracle:

"Sibyl, what do you want?"

and, suspended in her bubble, she replied: "I want to die."*

What, then, says the Grimoire?

It's a matter of opinion—but beyond its bounds we dare not step.

So cunningly devised, it's impossible to be changed

unless we really want to change, and I guess we don't.

We'll escape the mire by pulling on our pigtails.

That's what we always do when all else fails.

"T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land quotes as epigraph Petronius's Satyricon 48.8: "Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumīs ego ipse oculīs meīs vīdī in ampullā pendere, et cum illī puerī dīcerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondēbat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω" / "I with my own eyes once saw the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in her jar, and when the boys asked her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she answered, 'I want to die.'"

See also https://billmoyers.com/story/lets-end-the-damaging-cult-of-the-constitution/

The Hadedah: An Azanian Parable

But whence it came we know not, nor behold

Whither it goes. Even such, that transient Thing,

The human Soul . . .

—William Wordsworth, “Persuasion”

In our Cape Town kitchen, a hadada

ibis (Bostrychia hagedash), or

“hadedah,” mimicking its strident three-

note call onomatopoeically,

flies in, eats the kibbles left by Minou,

craps in a pot of Mexican bean stew,

and flies out, like the sparrow in the tale

told the king by the Venerable Bede*

that flies in through the gable at one end

of the hall in which the jarls are feasting

after raiding their detested neighbors

and exits, quid pro quo, at the other.

To which I can but add: one’s peck must needs

exceed one’s beak—or what’s a metaphor?!

*Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum / Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731 CE)

Four Poets in the Second World War

“No remedy, my retrospective friend,

We’ve found no remedy

. . . for our split mind,” wrote Drummond Allison.

“No room for mourning,”

Sidney Keyes explained.

Both died in ’43, Drummond just twenty-two, at Monte Cassino in Italy,

Sidney, not yet twenty-one, in North Africa:

“And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities

      Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees,”

Alun Lewis recalled—who died on the Arakan front in Burma (Myanmar?) in ’44.

“Blood, spirit, in this war. But night begins,

Night of the mind: who nowadays is conscious of our sins?”

Frank Prince, born in Kimberly in 1912, not far from the Big Hole, and where I once worked

in the Old Mint Buildings, summed up.

He survived—thanks to the god of war!

—and lived on till 2003,

expounding Milton, in Southampton by the sea.

Allison, “No Remedy”; Keyes, “William Wordsworth”; Lewis, “All Day It Has Rained”; Prince, “Soldiers Bathing,” in More Poems from the Forces, ed. Keidrych Rhys (1943).