JOHN MINGAY lives in Scotland. Parts of this poem appeared in Slope #3. from FIVE RIGHTS WRONGED (Parts IV-V) Four. From the eloquence of a sweeping rhetoric to the curiosity of a silent comment, the tangible calm of before, alone, acts as the history each moment answers. Of all accepted burdens, the simple and certain truth of happiness belongs to humanity. * Words are the beginning of the end of the race towards from where utter stillness immortalises the tribe. Never will time stifle this one fixed truth. In the present, everything follows - no-one has the innocence to taste the calm these days can only whisper. * Only so much can be slowed that is soiled, save in dreaming, and can be twisted to give life reason. Vision is the voice of silence: through its language it shelters each soul from the bedlam and gives birth to words that echo with passion. * No fragment can be enough in the midst of circumstances bowing to conformity, determined by faith, blind to the flesh, however furrowed or fettered, of the dawning glow as time unfolds. The genesis may reveal acid desire, but none shall know it by name, each, in his own way, untainted by being bound by ambition. * No-one can be disparaged by virtue of his thoughts if their telling ends the chaos: the welcome caress of inspiration is as the fragile echo of another moment to be grasped; sanctuary seized, direction assured. * A conceded possibility is the prison for the mind this virginal restraint awaits; every emotion a true likeness of sacrifice. To know is to decipher the symmetry of succession, of change, of space. * To tempt an allegory of time is to veneer creation, is to purify sorrow in whatever guise it may have been before. * Five. The echoing fragment of the abstract of age, that this confession concedes, will drift forever beyond this day: sensed at any one moment in everything each musing can embellish; reflected in the simple but certain belief in consciousness in calm as the destination to seek. * Remnants are revealed as symmetry quivering, familiar and forgiving, found in the awareness of seeing as the freeing of inherited time, in withstanding the deafening enthusiasm of the tribe. No flesh nor remnant can follow any one god who wrongs the rite life demands - those who listen, share the world. * Deeds are transcendent insofar as nothing is sacred in anything heard by way of truth. Words are equally marked by purity and, all told, their capacity absolves defeat. * Anyone can be expected to veil the sky in fear. Anyone can be excused. But anyone exposed to life will bow to time as long as permanence induces wrath. * Change may contribute to inevitability, but blinding desire will be nameless from the start: forever deemed to be shallow; considered needless in the knowing of being. * Symmetry, still quivering, unfurls the moment further and is relentless in becoming a gnawing history, answerable only to time, home to the mortal whims of one and all - the narrow verge of those assured. * A familiar relief is spread in measure for the pain of time this hunger seldom gathers in. To expect anyone to choose their jury while the dawn splinters is to make symmetry the way of judgement and of confronting the chaos of sacrifice. To ache for common drudgery is to calm the pulse of spirits witnessed. * ...and now, no-one need be hesitant alone where shared finality can follow the echo its flesh reveals. |