We Suffer To Be Broken
We suffer to be broken what can break
When cause of what is fragile in us finds
Wonder in beauty made for its own sake.
Not seen, or spoken, touched, yet still divined
Like promised shoots un-stirring from the soil
Until the spring, with winter left behind.
Whilst all should from life’s certainties recoil
Who would not know a bloom-less prospect first -
With chance to flower, equal chance to fail.
So too of others, though by far the worst
The heart that wagers more than it should stake
On winning joy when losing must bring hurt.
Yet still the chance that most prefer to take:
To suffer to be broken what can break.
Remember
Remember when we used to have seasons
Instead of this endless summer of electric
Light and measured heat, so with the curtains closed
We didn’t know if it was day or night.
Remember when we used to see with our eyes -
Our own eyes - not have delights delivered to us
Like a take-away, just to be thrown away
Again, replaced by something on the other side.
Remember when we used to write poetry.
And it wasn’t just a pastime or therapy
But something wonderful in its own right:
A craving and compulsion.
Remember the silence.
When did noise find time to mask each moment
Of our waking lives? And where did silence go? It went outside
To pace the empty roads and wander to and fro.
Remember when singing songs meant the massed
Ranks of men and women at the old Town Hall
Not echoes in the bathroom - the cries of an animal
That doesn’t know it’s caught.
Remember the daily grind, the one supposed only
To start and finish here - hard when it doesn’t take you
To another place, at least in body -
Sometimes giving purpose, sometimes dignity.
Remember when we used to think that time
Was short because we felt it moving,
Running from us, even. But now it’s just
Diluvium, damming every morning.
Remember when the past enveloped the future
And rang its death with a plague bell;
This is what it means to live in the present -
A kind of purgatory, and heaven, and hell.
In The Morning
And in a dream, before I closed my eyes,
Rocked in the night, so far from sleep,
Mounting my own Calvary;
Lost in the shade of the viaduct;
And falling into sunlight
Like a lizard on a hot rock
Either basking or dying here.
In the morning I am going to start again
And live again as the moon lives.
Eyes blinked away in the bathroom
(Gaudi blue-blood on the porcelain).
An aureole of shadows
Came to bed;
And, later, a cigarette.
The shabby aftermath begins, pretence
Of love emerging from the counterpane,
And breakfast on the cold remains.
One flake of snow falling
Itself a blizzard;
And a door slowly closing
On quotidian faces since remembered.
In the morning it is the world reborn,
Not I: Botero’s horse who points the sun
Across the sky - same shadows cast -
No light in day from other stars;
And I with barely strength remaining
To repeat, repeat, ad nauseam:
I am going to start again, in the morning.
The Zombie Glass
This is what you would have seen
An empty tunnel sucking back
The foetid air of the people stack
And West-bound words and whispers that
Belong to no-where but the black.
Flinching from the horror scene,
The hum, the thrum, the rails of death
Piping rats to the terror, breath,
Look up at the sky instead
Heaven is pasted overhead
In territory by marks disputed:
Pupils gouged in neat graffito
Gazing blindly down below
Eyeless to the culture show
A consequence of Ruin’s blow.
Something has to happen soon.
Something like a bargain plea.
And all of those who follow me
Must think of what they too may be
And might, and might, their future see.
Captured in the zombie glass
Face and face and face flash past,
Whoever makes the looking glass
Show what it knows - knows what to ask -
Will see themselves complete at last
And then exposed:
Like face-cleats of a seam begin
In surface lines that hide within
The fissures and the rock formations
Every gold and silver thing.
But what of those you cannot see?
The wielder of the perspicacious
knife,
Cutting out his heart to save his
life,
Cutting where the pain is rife
Or won’t survive.
Taken back to Murder Street.
Shown the place where Agnes’ flame
Was lit, and lit, and lit again:
Will you from bitter sacrament
abstain
Or be yourself, the blameless,
blamed?
Why should the holy Lords escape
If they act devils when they come
Like cataracts that plague the sun
Darkening eyes of everyone
To natural light and reason?
Oh, what is it I have become?
See me as I am not as you need me.
Let this bodily machinery
Moved by pure will now and airy
Saving that it must be wary
Of the ineludible, the final act.
Beckoned forth at Birling Gap
The Seven Sisters seeing that
A lowly spirit struggled raised him
up,
And up, and up, until I sat
As high as I had ever been
In such an awe-full, gloried state
I felt the lifting of the weight
And dread begin to dissipate
And sense of ending forced to wait.
But calendars had marked the date:
The rise of morning set in train
A million movements until when
I stood behind the yellow line
To look beyond the crowd again
And hesitated.
Another petal fell instead -
Though seemed from the same flower
head -
As bright as any wound that bled
Or dress that lost a ravelled
thread:
I couldn’t follow where she led.
I crossed the line - but not to take
The invitation Charon made -
To carry on, that end delayed,
Towards Burnt Oak and future days.
I Saw Him, But No-One Believed Me
I saw him, but no-one believed me.
Not even in flight
Or against the sun
But on a fence post, looking,
As we drove across the Glen.
I saw him, but no-one believed me.
In the Samode Haveli
A thousand miles from home,
Nursing a glass of whisky
And smoking his blue Gitanes.
I saw him, but no-one believed me.
He, who they all thought dead,
Undeterred by the unfamiliar,
And making a world of pain
Make peace with itself again.
I saw him, but no-one believed me,
Alive in unleavened bread,
Who sat himself beside me,
And took the pain inside me
Into himself instead.
I saw him, but no-one believed me,
Caught in the mirror’s eye.
And, viewed in a different light,
All these and other things,
Perhaps imaginary.
Herb Tate is a teacher and poet who lives and works in the UK. He has
had a few longer works published in Plum Tree Tavern and Philosophy Now but
primarily writes haibun, haiku and senryu: his short form poetry has featured
in a wide range of on-line and print journals including Frogpond, Modern Haiku,
The Heron’s Nest, Akitsu Quarterly, First Frost, Presence, Autumn Moon Haiku
Journal, Blithe Spirit, Wales Haiku Journal, Hedgerow, Poetry Pea Journal,
Failed Haiku, Prune Juice, Whiptail, Heterodox Haiku, Drifting Sands,
Contemporary Haibun Online, Bones, dadakuku, Cold Moon Journal, Pan Haiku
Review, Under the Basho, and others.
www.herbtate.com
