Five Poems by Simon MacCulloch

 

The Tree of Life

 

I’ve watched the tree outside my window grow

Each year, each decade, greater and more green

A mighty maturation, quiet and slow

Wind-tossed, rain-soaked, sun-scorched and yet serene

Until a gnarled profusion fills the eye

And rears its sprightly splendour to the sky.

 

I too am old, and yet my body’s shrunk

And all I am seems lesser than before.

My weakened flesh and troubled mind have sunk

And shrivelled round a hard, protesting core

Which snarls “I wasn’t meant to be this way!”

While sense and senses dwindle day by day.

 

But I am not that tree, and it is wrong

To use such simple sights to weigh my worth

As if my limbs could ever be so strong

As if my years were measured by my girth.

The life I’ve led has grown through time, not space

A flowering of the spirit, not the face.

 

And when I look across the years behind

Though many are the things that I forget

Some glimpses of some goodness come to mind:

The children whom I raised, who love me yet

And friends and neighbours succoured year on year

With help, advice and patient listening ear.

 

The shape’s elusive; others saw but parts

Some facet of myself, some shard of me.

The whole’s in fragments, hidden in their hearts

The look and stature of my lifetime’s tree

A jigsaw puzzle waiting for the hand

To build it, and the brain to understand.

 

Perfection is illusion; still I hope

That one day, when my all is said and done

That picture of my soul for which I grope

Will form itself before the eye of One

Whose seeing is the font of time and space

Whose loving is the source of every grace.

 

And then, who knows? Perhaps the life I’ve led

Will bear the Gardener’s scrutiny, and be

With shining leaves aflutter, branches spread

An image of that one Edenic tree

That Adam missed; and, greater than before

I’ll eat its fruit, and live forevermore.

 

Nancy MacCulloch (1925-2019)

 

 

Sun Bird

 

A pigeon lies decapitated, leaking on the road

A feathered lump of sorrow or a cipher, one whose code

Is written in the excrement that daubs the deadened cars

Inscribed among the groping weeds and patterned in the stars

A message barely understood but poisonous with fear:

The horror is endemic - we are interlopers here.

 

The pigeon-killing foxes overrun the straggling lawn

I hear their scornful squeaking in the dark before the dawn

A chorus of derision - we have botched the hunter’s part

As surely as we botched our role in Eden at the start

And most of what we try to do is neither here nor there

A passing stain upon the earth or stench upon the air.

 

What hope for such a misfit rabble, scratching in the dirt

To build a tattered shelter in a universe of hurt?

The chaos born of entropy, the crumbling in decay

The only law that ultimately all of us obey.

To write of it, to revel in it, scrawl it on the page:

The squawking of a pigeon off its head with futile rage. 

 

In far-off lands in ancient days a better bird was known

Which spared itself the sin of Eve of all the birds alone

An emblem of perfection resurrected time on time

To reconcile the cosmos with the fractured human rime.

So when the headless pigeons smear the highways with despair

Look deep within your heart and find the phoenix nesting there.

 

 

Crock of Gold

 

When the lizards looked up to a rainbowed sky

Through the murk of the swamp of a green world’s dawn

Was it then that the dream of the gold was born

In the star-sharp glint of a reptile eye?

(Does a rub with a gold ring cure a sty?)

 

When the first warm beasts roamed the ice-free plains

And their hides drew tight as the clouds swelled dark

Did they sniff for the promise of a pastel arc

Like the arch of an exit from the shimmering rains?

(If we purge what is base is it gold that remains?)

 

Now a man probes the void with an eye grown great

And the farther he sees past the old sun’s glow

Then the more that it seems that he’ll never know

What it is that he’d find through the rainbow gate

For the distance is long, so its light comes late.

 

But the quest carries on towards the cosmic heart

Where it beats out its pulse in the ancient black

As the light-years traversed peel the ages back

Till we see what was there at the very start

 - See the bright dense whole of which all was part.

 

Then the stars burn out and the worlds drift cold

And the vast curved course of the dream is done

And the treasure lost is the treasure won

For we soared to the source of creation’s gold

And the myth that we made is a history told.

 

 

Effusion

 

The flowers bulge with pregnancies of light

As buttery stormglow saturates the scene

A landscape pulsing garish to invite

The waters that will wash its fever clean

Translating what its oozing colours mean.

 

So when the sodden verdure sprays its glints

Of light delivered sparkling from on high

Those leafy constellations whisper hints

Of what the sun has spoken in the sky

In answer to the flowers’ question why.

 

That answer’s not for us to see in full

We view instead a softly curving part

The ribbons that the dancing raindrops pull

Uniting all the tints of Nature’s art

In glow of sun and glow of flower’s heart.

 

To draw our burning storm-bred colours out

As Nature has her waters, we have speech

Emotion and experience one vast shout

Suspended at the limits of our reach

To join us, heart and cosmos, each to each.

 

 

Jack O’Lantern

 

I tricked the Devil, the Devil tricked me

Oh, ’twas rare fun that we had!

Quick as a whip I was, one, two, and three!

Caught in my purse-strings or stuck up a tree

Made me a bargain, then let him go free.

Look at me now, my lad.

 

Hands off my soul, never take it, I said

Sure, for my life had been bad

Fearing the fire, I was, once I was dead

Wanted to get me to heaven instead

Never was slow about using my head.

Look at me now, my lad.

 

When my time came there was nowhere to go

Truly, I must have been mad

Jack wasn’t wanted above or below

Devil just laughed when St Peter said no

Gave me this coal - “Light your way with its glow”.

Look at me now, my lad.

 

Out in the boglands when evening comes creeping

Weary and lonesome and sad

That’s where you’ll see me, if you should come peeping

Looking for Jack while the good folk are sleeping.

Look then - my face, where the Devil-fire’s leaping!

Look at me now, my lad!

 

Sure that’s just a legend, a fool’s-fire, a lie

Tales, and for that I am glad

Life’s for the living, you die when you die

Head made a hollow whatever you try

Carved on your gravestone, a grinning goodbye:

Look at me now, my lad.

Simon MacCulloch lives in London and is a regular contributor to Reach Poetry, The Dawntreader and Aphelion.