In the armpit of a tree
between striking chords of grass
everything chasing
nothing
everybody chasing
breaking wind to interrupt
the symphony of airconditioners

I think he left a note somewhere
Waiting on the obverse of a kite.

Les Murray is a poet of the voice. His genius lies in making strange that most familiar sound, capturing it and presenting it on a page. Often what he has to say feels less significant than the inflection and accent with which he carries it through.
Stephen Edgar strikes me as being a poet of the eye. He is one of the rare breed of modern poets who disciplines himself to use formal metrical and rhyming structures – a discipline that engages the eye as well as the ear. And the sense I have of his poems (the very few I’ve read so far) is that he is concerned with communicating vision.
The poem Memorial was written in response to viewing an exhibition of photographs depicting lynchings that took place in the South of the United States. In particular, Memorial is a viewing-by-verse of a photograph of the lynching of Rubin Stacy in 1935.
The poem is saturated with religious language: the hanging corpse is ‘transfigured’, the onlookers in the photograph ‘contemplate the mystery’. In the second stanza the beholders are being ‘devoured’, ‘sliced’, ‘enticed’ – what the photograph depicts is a grotesque Holy Communion, the memorial of an Anti-Crucifixion in which the celebrants are themselves consumed.
The final two stanzas zoom in on a girl in the left of the photograph, ‘a girl of twelve, maybe’. She is smiling, ‘lit up with a half-embarrassed leer’. Drawn into this moment, she is hanging between innocence and trespass. (or maybe the point is that there was never any innocence?) Unlike the other participants who souvenir elements of the body, the girl will live her life in the knowledge of this horror. ‘This hour will hang between her and the light’.
Whenever this photo is done in remembrance of him, she will find herself damned, not redeemed.

Memorial
The lynching of Rubin Stacy, 19 July 1935

In the still transfiguration of sunshine
That whites out almost all one leg and arm
Until they merge into the slender pine
He’s hanging from with an inhuman calm,
Who are these blanched beholders gathered round
To contemplate the mystery they attend
With titillated awe?
What men and women and what children bound
In witness of the hour that they suspend
Lightlong? What shocked observance of what law?

Two little girls are standing at the right,
One staring at the lens perplexedly,
The other, half her face devoured by light
Bright as her smock, lifting her eyes to see.
There’s one man whom the trunk obscures and slices
From view, a woman peering as though round
A door or window frame
At something not quite decent which entices
Attention even so, and will confound
Every objection modesty might name.

And then you see her. At the left she stands,
Behind the awful focus of suspense,
Her hands crossed, mimicking his handcuffed hands,
On her frocked crotch, her naked face intense
And lit up with a half-embarrassed leer,
A girl of twelve, maybe, too unaware
To mask her downward grin.
Sometimes the witnesses would souvenir
Some item: a photograph, a hank of hair,
A severed finger joint, a scrap of skin.

Surely she’ll have no need of them. For here
This ritual and her rapture will unite,
Surely, into a lifelong souvenir.
This hour will hang between her and the light,
Between her and her life to come, this scene
And what she is in it will interpose
Imperishably through
The days that have to be the day that’s been,
Lighting forever everything she knows
With what she saw, and knows she saw, and knew.

Stephen Edgar, “Memorial” in History of the Day, (North Fitzroy, Victoria: Black Pepper, 2009), 51-52.

No word in the wind and waves, still still.
A spirit hovering over the waters. No form
to a void the questioning. And the answers.

From today, what is this world? This earth,
of rotting gods’ bodies, fecund with promises,
who eats her young, slowly digested by sea?

Oh please swallow me! Drink me down
like Jonah. For though it was all Not,
I denied it. When yesterday today was

And hope hung. Outstretched they bask
On the beach, and children keep the Sabbath
with games that have no obvious resolution.

Of dying and rising, who can tell? That tomb? Besides
the fresh cut grave, the wounded earth, I listened.
But his mouth was stopped with stone.

Image by mshades

If knowing how to field dress a moose doesn’t get you in the mood. Check out Sarah Palin’s more sensitive side. And then slip over to the Economist for your chance to pseudo-exercise your right to vote.

“You Can’t Blink”

You can’t blink.
You have to be wired
In a way of being
So committed to the mission,

The mission that we’re on,
Reform of this country,
And victory in the war,
You can’t blink.

So I didn’t blink.

(To C. Gibson, ABC News, Sept. 11, 2008)

“Befoulers of the Verbiage”

It was an unfair attack on the verbiage
That Senator McCain chose to use,
Because the fundamentals,
As he was having to explain afterwards,
He means our workforce.
He means the ingenuity of the American.
And of course that is strong,
And that is the foundation of our economy.
So that was an unfair attack there,
Again based on verbiage.

(To S. Hannity, Fox News, Sept. 18, 2008)

“So much climbing, on a spherical world;
had Newton not been a mere beginner at gravity
he might have asked how the apple got up there
in the first place. And so might have discerned
an ampler physics.”

(Les Murray, Quintets for Robert Morley, New Selected Poems)

Every word is yours,
and still words fail
Every move is yours
Let us give praise!

To you, all flesh is turned,
Into your ear, our hearts and hurts are poured.
The Hearer, the Ear of Prayer.
Who can resist You listening?

An ugly word, what weight of drowning?
More than silence is worth.
You bring forth my voice,
O, Word of forgiveness.

In your house I live.
No guest. A son.
The angels ascending and descending on Him
Raise me up!

In holiness, in that holy place, in His space.
The one who lives with you, lives.

V
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.
(Ash Wednesday, T.S. Eliot)

“Then Pilate took Jesus and had Him flogged. The soldiers also twisted together a crown of thorns, put it on His head, and threw a purple robe around Him. And they repeatedly came up to Him and said, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and were slapping His face.
Pilate went outside again and said to them, “Look, I’m bringing Him outside to you to let you know I find no grounds for charging Him.”
Then Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Here is the man!”

When the chief priests and the temple police saw Him, they shouted, “Crucify! Crucify!” Pilate responded, “Take Him and crucify Him yourselves, for I find no grounds for charging Him.”
“We have a law,” the Jews replied to him, “and according to that law He must die, because He made Himself the Son of God.”
When Pilate heard this statement, he was more afraid than ever. He went back into the headquarters and asked Jesus, “Where are You from?” But Jesus did not give him an answer.” (John 19:1-9 HCSB)

Some poems have their own gravitational field that ensures you keep orbiting back at specific times or through certain circumstances. It’s nearly Easter, it’s the time for reading Ash Wednesday.
What I notice this time is that even the poetic density of Eliot’s description can’t comprehend the questions, the cries, and the silence, as the world seeks words with which to bind the Word.

VII

Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp’d no more —
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

In Memoriam
Tennyson, 1849