9.Map of Storms - Duncan McGibbon (13 inch ebook reader txt) 📗

the yard one Christmas.
They were placeless, in bedtime riot,
The same as their own,
but eerily elsewhere, out in the night.

In the park a deep stream flowed dark,
under an ornate bridge.
Yet only the white swan could play there.
In the museum, a panther glowered,
ebony and ivory inside a glass case.

From his window, even under distant rain,
he could see the Cook memorial.
In the Thornley-Walkers’ car, he passed it,
a sunlit pin above the moors,
crowning the Cleveland tapistry.

At school, he loathed the strident care of nuns.
He puzzled at the prayer-worn picture
of a solemn child with wounded hands and feet.
While the holy family smiled officially.
Low tide exposed the yellow ribs of rotting barges.

Another night he heard beasts bellow of murder.
A fire was fraying the Asylum farm.
Its virile violence tearing at the night.
Smelling charred voices,
he dreamt of a ruined place, haunted, on the hills.


The Museum in the Snow.

Once still snow fell on the museum grounds.
We tramped Clark's shoeprints to the doorway,
mimicking its fiction of sculptured fossils.
The main hall was a railway station,
but a cathedral too, with animal saints.
Studious drones hymned the argument by Design,
while Paley and Owen checked their watches
for the coming of naked, hairless man.

There was a battered case of humming birds
whose peeling paint we always recongnised.
The snow outside the leaded windows,
on petrified trees in the muffled park,
threw chastened light onto its chilly glass
and enlivened their frozen, time-vacuumed flight.
A hawk's head was reflected in the pane.
I thought real fear stared for a moment
from those tiny eyes of brittle glass.

We ran off then upstairs, past dust-grimed walls
to find a fixed lesson of framed flowers
faded to crushed purple or fainter crimson.
There all was paper-dry, or had a thirsty stem.
Through another door we saw fat fishes,
devoutly drink insipid immortality
in pure, transparent, sealed up jars,
but teachers pulled us from the Spirit house.

We met blind children, punching Braille
and touching the elephant's hairy skin
until the guard called, "Don't touch. Don't touch, there!"
The books they had were heavy with cleverness.


Revisiting

I look through
classroom panes
as children cuss
at rugby
on the mist-
sodden field.

School gave no
prizes for
tenderness,
as giving
trees a name
means rubbing
barks, unless
someone hads
the time to
wait for leaves.

Who could name
such striplings
from their pith?
Ours is a time
of brittle bark
and leaves
forbidden
to fall.


Centobar:

Working Back


In The Avici Hells


From dark to dark the truck years flash
beneath the minute's yardlight.
Age trundles its commerce
down Derv-stained tarmac where tracks fire
from axon into axon, its reflective image.
We spend our passion in the climb for peaks
which are unreachable in sensuous light.
Sodium days pale from yellow to poster-red,
while shame's throwaway razors shrive our throats.
of contingent growth. Day by day we enter
the Western doorway, looking for where the heat is,
conventionally ablaze. Careering,
we look for openings in the inner heaven.
We arrive there and they close.
The pens of correction rain down red
on the white sheets of examinable space.
to emasculate sorrow into silence and print
a view, a life, a number, a place.
Elsewhere, the wooden Arhats smile their
perfunctory sublime, knowing we are too heavy to burn.
our flames flare up from failure's wastage
as desire undoes our ecstasy to re-emerge in pain.
We run ahead to get back from getting out;
which is all a question of the right way,
of getting the words to the conning-tower right,
of telling street lights from runways in the dark.
Lungs persist in the fire and breath takes strength
fro mfurnaces. Words never make an end of anything.
and cannot help us down to earth in this air-bus.
We wake to find ourselves in charge of . Can lifetime's
searchlights finger our space in the skies? Do we throttle
back to deliver what will merely be the next near-miss?


Adam's Prayer

Under his own shadow,
landforms cool of that clamouring light.

Your form again in the hospital wards,
darkness cast on an empty bed.

He envied the stones their silence.
He watched their surfaces for breath.

Angular, a sleeping child
is caught in the door's narrowing ray.

He felt first pain winnowing his blood
mocking a mute perfection with strange thirst.

A pink doll falls suddenly from a shelf
to the stopped concern of encroaching staff.

He roared, enraged and passage-birds
flew into the white air with clanging panic.

Light seethes behind the blind
picking out an unhungering bulk
in your once-personal shape.


Aisling's Dolls

Dumped bathmates, her dense-bodied babies lie
in dull speechlessness, the hue of mustard.
Their fleecy, nylon hairdos stranded on dry
enamel snow. Those brows unpuckered
by concern solid ears that do not try
to listen. As if buffed eyes ever stirred
to seek out a first designer or high
purposiveness. They are uncalled, unfestered
by God. Their pert eyelids cannot cry
even for dud hopes. In their void, we're absurd,
have minds, hands, choice and sense and yet defy
our nullity and hunger to be heard.
Images of God, even in sleep, they do not lie.
not to endure, yet to be sure, they do not die.


Working Back

I go through routines of closure;
the language of endings, suffixing the day
with the plural of habit, the regret
of past tense, or a gerund reprieve,
from being a button
at the fingertip of another's ambition.
I switch off those inaccessible lights,
by arguing back the logic of flexes
until I fumble for the sockets
in the dark. - like a childhood memory
of the T.V., stereo and processor
back to the one power point,
to disable some nameless danger
behind the sense's technic reach.
Now it is dark; stetching to pull down the window
I see boughs sway. Branches trace back
to the centre where the wind probes
for some future unrooting.
I think back to the time when hope was
a little child, his precious toy destroyed at school
returning tearfully home to his dad
for some magic repair.


Isobar:

Pastoral Landscapes after a Storm


On the Ox's Back.

An hour before the chief wife's
baby boy was born, a perfect white ox
was calved. Mwene said he would call
the ox ,Ubongopa, and place the boy on its back.

1. Mwene

The boy's was named Kamaga
and he grew up on the ox's back,
indifferent to nights,
when the water became ice,
and guarded his father's kraal.

Each day he said;

'Wake up Ubongopa.'
The sun has risen up
into the morning skies.”

And when it
rose with the boy
on its back Kamaga said;

“Let us go out now
it is time to start
Tell all the cattle
that understand
how new the day is
and how sweet the grass is
with the fresh day’s dew.”

Obongopa bellowed; the cattle staggered to gorge
the pastureland until the late afternoonThen Kamaga said;

“Let us go back to the kraal.
The sun is sinking down
Seen the leopard slinks
sharp is its hunger
eager its instinct to fight
Through the tall grass he silently stalks
come everyone, its time for our dreams
it is time for our sleep.”

And the cattle went back to the kraal,
while the sun began to sleep, unfolding
a huge red blanket across the wide sky
and a the gates closed, Kamago
ate his supper on Ubongopa's back
while the early stars upon hled in the sky
and said:

Go to sleep now, my herd
Go to sleep until the dawnlight
is woken by the morning rooster's call.
In the cold night the dew begins to fall.
At daybreak, sweet grass will call.

So Kamago grew into manhood

2. Mtetwa

One moonless night, men broke into the kraal,
to drive out the cattle with thin lances,
but the cattle did not stir for four nights.
on the fifth they tied a lit bundle
of sticks to their tails
but still the cattle did not wake up
while the western instruments shattered in the men’s hands.

On the sixth night the same thing happened,
but each kept a flintlock intact.
Kamaga heard their leader whisper.
The boy on the ox is the one who has done this
and they brought their flintlocks near
and said 'Tell the cattle to move or you'll
die on that white ox of yours”
Kamago slowly spoke;

“Let us go out now
It is time
Tell all the cattle
That they should know
the day is new
The grass is sweet
with morning dew
we're going where we've never been
Captured by thieves we've never seen.”

The white ox bellowed urgently, but
softly into the dark.
and the cattle went out through the gate
The leader growled

You must come too,
on your fine ox, or my men will kill you.”

Kamago replied calmly.

No-one can stab me
I cannot die
Stab me, break your bayonets.
I'll still come with you
no matter how far
and with me, Ubangopa,
We're going where we've never been
captured by thieves we haven't seen

3. Difaquane

When morning came,
the tribe noticed the boy and his ox were gone
and the wise man said to the chief:
'Kamoga, the future king has become a man.
He has stolen away the cattle
while the people slept,
Hence he has accomplished
the law of the tribe

"Make a feast,
prepare the beer,
we must rejoice."
and they did,
but darkness fell again
and still he did not return
and the tribe began to fear.


4. Mfecane

They had taken Kamaga
to the chief of the next tribe
The men said "We cannot
kill these bewitched cattle,
kill the white ox, and
Kamaga will have no power.
The chief answered;
we will get him down to hte pround
and ordered Kamaga
to lead the cattle into a knoal
Ubangapa, lead the cattle in
to where the chief says
we're going where we're rereteen
captured by thieves we've never seen

The boy ignored the chief's command
to come down to the ground, saying:
'I live up here
You live down there
My feet have never touched the ground
The chief ordered him down again
This time he did, saying
'Ubngopa, I am getting down
To walk upon the ground, the earth,
Having lived upon your sturdy back
Ever since the day of my birth
We're going to where we're never been seen
Captured by thieves we've never seen

5. Maburu.

The took him to a shanty town house
He could see stars in the roof
and when they brought him food he cried:
Take it away, for I cannot eat my food on the ground
only on the back of my white ox Ubongopa
And he spat upon the ground
in his disgust and the people ran into the nearby hills.
taking all their cattle with them
for the spittle grew and grew
A voice from inside said;
You are as strong as this mountain
your spittle can make a fountain
To make their clouds pour out their rain
with thunder and lightening again and again
The sky darkened and a river of rain fell
in the place where the village was, nowhere