Five Poems by Simon MacCulloch

 

Dreamer

 

The castle’s ghosts are all aglow

A haunting brighter than before

A fevered corpse-light lit to show

We few who venture through its door

How once a bloody warrior strode

Through halls bedecked with battle gear

And here a servant bore his load

While there a prisoner watched in fear

And heard in every clink of key

Each echoed step, each muttered phrase

The dreaded end to misery

The closure of his lightless days.

 

The castle’s ghosts are in a trance

In stately waltz spin slowly round

Condemned to dance their endless dance

Since ancient time on ancient ground.

What puppeteer could hope to match

This theatre of unquiet sleep?

What portrait painter dared to catch

Such trembling souls from out the deep?

The murdered child, the tortured priest

The dungeon masters and their slaves

A world of Darkness here released

To Light more cruel than their graves.

 

The castle’s walls and lawns have known

Since long dead masons raised its towers

That colder things than clay have grown

Beneath its crypts, below its bowers.

When moat was lake and barrow hill

They troubled not the ones who lie

In timeless slumber, dreaming still

Of moon when freshly cast in sky.

But humankind in grief and rage

With sprinkled blood and echoed screams

Has brutally closed that silent age

And now our pain infects their dreams.

 

The castle’s ghosts are parts we glimpse

Of drama in a nightmared mind

A mind so vast its night-time imps

Are shared with all, by light defined.

And with that knowledge we bold few

In whom mere spectres struck no fear

Make haste to see the stars anew

From somewhere safely far from here.

For as the moon grows pale with dawn

And glassless windows watch day break

We wonder with what hungry yawn

That long-vexed dreamer will awake.

 

 

Garden of Remembrance

 

A dim green garden walled around with shade

Deep-carpeted with moss

With only muted birdsong to invade

The silence draped across

Its ivied trees.

Part-roofed by these

I make the room in which to hoard my loss.

 

No carven stone to catch, no urn to hold

The eye for relics questing

And leaves, not statues, serve here to unfold

Wings mournful, never resting.

That ruffling breeze

Through ivied trees

The only hint of where the ghosts are nesting.

 

What loss, what ghosts give sense to such a setting?

The ghosts of might-have-been!

A life not for remembering, nor forgetting

Which haunts the in-between

A blurry frieze

Like ivied trees

Whose true shapes are suggested, never seen.

 

I used to hope to find a slim young sapling

To make that garden grow

But longer shadows on the moss are dappling

And I prepare to go.

Goodbye, old trees

You hid the keys

To more of life than I shall ever know.

 

 

Joy

 

The place beside the stream where you and I once went to play

Is overgrown with weeds. The weeds and earth cannot recall

The sun and sand and smiles that made a certain summer day

A time in which contentment found its apex and its all.

We too are overgrown, and age has silted up the mind

Our blood runs slow and childhood’s bliss is buried far behind.

 

The morning with the book in which you taught me how to read

Is overlaid with years. The years and cares have pressed it flat

Its magic of discovery, a talent nurtured, freed

To make the world its oyster - but I never managed that.

We too are overladen, worries weight us till we crawl

Our heads hang low and childhood’s leaps collapse in lifetime’s sprawl.

 

And so the shining moments dim and dwindle in the dark

An evanescent fountaining of brightness fading fast

A glimpse of reading in a room or walking in a park

Recalled and cherished, then let go, to die away at last.

But you, your smile, your voice, your love of fun are with me still

And that is what made joy of all we did, and always will.

 

 

Assumption

Inspired by J K Potter’s photo-composition “Dark Angel” (1991)

 

Extruded from the dark rich earth of old Versailles

A satin-garbed enchantress pierces lowering sky

With hands at breast and shoulders back and head tipped high

A black Madonna, yearning yet serenely proud

Whose flexing feathers blur amidst the seething cloud.

 

And in the garden sculpted bushes steal her form

Awaiting only wings to let them lift and swarm

To merge their cloddish bodies with the coming storm

All matter mutely crying here for spirit’s flight

Suspended in the hush between the dark and light.

 

And that is all there is, a bleak but splendid all

A twilight rapture, incomplete, a demon call

Which summons creatures rooted fast yet reaching tall

Delighting and tormenting with the hope and fear

Of some transcendent state forever far yet near.

 

So this the very cusp of our aspiring art

Expressing what we can of that enchanted part:

The soul that springs from reaching mind and rooted heart

To print a doomed ambition on a doubtful sky

And make a dusky heaven out of old Versailles.

 

 

Bird Song

 

What do birds know of the silence that speckles their song?

Is there a meaning for them in the sunlight through leaves?

Instant by instant the glittering tapestry weaves

Where is the soul who can say where his stitches belong?

 

Order and chaos emerge from alternative views

Self into world is the magic we try to arrange

World into self is the counter-spell, making us strange

Who knows the dream-melted shape in which self and world fuse?

 

Phlegm in the blood forms a shell that the noon heat leaves cold

Hyperaesthesia may open the heart to the night

Which best to judge between foolish and wise, wrong and right?

Damned if we do as we please, if we do as we’re told.

 

Life is too short and the ways of the world are too long

Truth is an eye-blink and doubt is a long, troubled sleep

What did God see in the darkness that covered the deep?

What do birds know of the silence that speckles their song?

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