Five Poems by Herb Tate

 

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