Stanley Mason
LAST GOODBYE
Slips from my winter hand the grail
of appled years, of dappled hours,
spilling the treasures that we thought
were sine die ours.
Spins from the sun's sustaining fire
this fabled earth's now feeble spark
into the voiceless and the void
of unrelenting dark.
Falls from the skies the spell of frost
that scatters deep, that utters slow
over the landscape of our love
the everlasting snow.
THE NEW BIRDS
What are the fingers in the sky?
What scarecrow wailing drowns the dream?
Children when the moon is high
In darkened houses wake and scream.
O quiet mother in your bed,
It is the iron swan that sings,
It is the new and lovely birds
That startle midnight with their wings.
Above the hurt and huddling town
Their cruciate bodies jag the gloom,
True to their nightly tryst with man
Whose love is heavy in their womb.
On our inferno and their child
One by one they plant their kiss;
The chill clear eyes of dead girls hold
Their evil birdlike images.
O sweet crushed mother under stones,
Lift up your head and see them fly
Whose wings are women in your bones
And for whose love your children die.
SALOME
Your eyes are wishing wells to draw up dreams
Like dead men pale as pearls. Their lashes lie
In ambush in a bright black night where cry
Souls sabred by your lips in starlit rooms.
Apples in children's hands your shoulders are.
Your breasts are like two heavy moons that wait
Naked in the wheat. O love let fall your fate
And drown me in your hair's Niagara.
Your feet are shells on undiscovered shores.
Your legs are made of May like miracles.
He dies who to your velvet dungeon falls
The aromatic deaths of flies in flowers,
In nectar deep enlabyrinthed that far
More potent is than poison poppies are.
FROM A LIBYAN ELEGY
Thief of my sleep, the heartbreak clock
wakes me in Europe as the small hours crawl
westwards towards the Atlantic's heave and fall.
Through the dark window I see their foreign stars.
The village I was born in is five thousand miles away.
One I loved lies buried in Africa.
Earth makes me smaller than a drop of memory
on the rim of an old man's dream
before some unforetold and final dawn.
Two thousand years ago, somewhere Jesus was born
into a night like this. The heavens turn.
Earth grows colder as love recedes from us.
Your four dimensions in which my soul is lost
like a compass needle in a haystack of despair,
how shall I find my way to the love of the past?
Beyond the door I hear my daughter's cry
in her baby sleep. Her mother lifts her head.
In the street below a soldier's feet go by.
Wherever I turn the unquiet fears like rats
scutter across the night of the human heart.
Wherever I turn I meet the ghost goodbye.
Evil goodbye that will not let love live,
how shall I light the way through shame and sorrow
for the love of today and the innocent love of tomorrow?
Here I lie in the night, a homeless one,
ready to suffer, for love's sake willing to give
all I can claim for myself, or am, or have.
My baby cries and my sweetheart lifts her head.
And tomorrow lies in wait with the morning paper
and a headline that will stab all kindness dead.
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