9.Map of Storms by Duncan McGibbon (classic books for 12 year olds TXT) 📕

have I for exhaustion's drowse?

Since from the shell-lips of my triad mouths,
I pray the song of thought and ecstasy,
I have not time for the speech of lethargy.


Ossuna At Salcedo.

Above, under Norte, lies Pastrana.
By the night star's hour hand,
twenty leagues past us, Guadalajara
sleeps in the breve of the Matin bell's clang.

I keep midnight's rule, two hours in prayer,
by fingering the charm Francesca wore.
holding the virgin Mary sinless is my dare,
a greater creature for the Son she bore.

A novice I knew once fell in a trance
at the sight of a cock that beat its wings
before crowing. In nature a greater stance
fully swells with the folly of high things.

After Nones, I recall drawing water with Ortiz
and scanned the hills rather that probe his silence.
I fear that carnal negligence he pleads
will burst his pitcher's passive semblance.

We draw diverse draughts from one girl's glance.
Though I thought her blessed with rare grace, the shadow
of Ximenes begins to haunt her spirit's dance.
I pray the captive is awake, for my lamp is shallow.

In recollection of my beaten Lord
I await my own abandon to His will.
Outwardly I gather notes for the bored
bretheren who lie here in a dry swill.

Within it is with her circling moths
I fly, with Los Alumbrados, thralled
to the pulverising flame of the lost,
but I write for an unborn soul He called.

I claim He can touch souls without consent
in the parchment of my meditation
obliged to wander from my theme, that moment
I knew it was Francesca I felt bound to mention.

I dare to claim that Mary rose into the skies
A gift given so singly could not show man's blight
I shall forget my apostate's alluring eyes
and think only of my book, my unborn baby's sight.

as it lies awake in human darkness to assuage
the pain of an unknown hunger whose void
it cannot fill. Soon this law-bound age
will fade, yet my book will not be destroyed

by the inquisitive flame. From this dry home
its words will travel in the loaded carts
to Ortosa, Madrid, Salamanca, Rome,
to suckle the strategy of prayer that is my art.

I have kept my rule and now I burn her charm
keeping the secret of my concupiscence within,
hoping passion keeps the Church from harm
and legal rage and, yet, cast out my traitor, sin.


Sibelius At Jarvenpaa


"The long silence...
lies in a complex of
reasons; first and
foremost, a heightened
sense of self-
criticism"

R. Layton

The old man always takes his morning walk
wearing a Homburg and carrying a cane.
He totters forwards to the forest's edge,
and stares ahead, watched over from the house.
Perhaps he thinks back twenty years before
when he had thought here of the old belief.

And he had put the sheets of a song in
the shallow drawer which rattled in his hands.

He spoke to birch trees, asking them for wood
to lay the hull to start the boat for God.
They answered in the voice of Aino
they had only wood of beds for lovers.
Then he spoke to fir trees and asked them too
for the wood he wanted. They answered him
in his father's voice they had only wood
for coffins that the dead could lie upon.
He came to where an old oak stood and asked
for wood. It answered in his own flat voice,
even though its trunk was churned with worms;
it had the wood, if he could find the spell
to shape the boat. He must have had the old
trunk felled and cleared twenty years ago.

and the old man opened the hot stove door
to burn a crumpled symphony to ash.

Later he had dreamed he shot swan's necks
while drunk with Mussorgski in St Petersburg.
In Spring he dreamed he hunted lungs of stags
to Ein Heldenleben in Augsburg,
across orchestra stalls while Strauss counted time
He dreamed of the tongues of Russian cranes
and with Prokofiev, he killed a flight of them.
Through twenty summers he hung up a hundred
words, but never dreamed the words to make God's boat.
Then suddenly he thought of Arhippa,
the singer, who lay dead beneath the earth.
Now his chin was weighted down by podsoil
His whitened bristles were clumps of birch.
His shoulders were fluted with rigid pines.
He had dug for twenty years, not finding him.
Then his men retired, leaving him alone.

Perhaps Aino doesn't see him from the window
as he stumbles and his foot breaks
into a worn, snow-covered rabbit hole.
It falls into Arhippa's mouth.
and his breath burns through to his knee.
From the edge of the forest it looks
as if the old man is doubled over
as he wrestles a forge from the dead man's breath
No-one sees him hammer a long blade
and dig it deep in Arhippa's mouth.
The dead man's jaws cut through its iron
cladding but cannot spit out its hard steel
edge that makes the wounded earth tremble
The land crackles as charcoal falls
into Arhippa's cheeks and iron shards
into his lungs. Arhippa roars "Quit my mouth!"
and the old man's boat is finished
As he walks back along the path to the villa,
perhaps the old man gives it no more thought,
mentions the cranes seemed to say goodbye to him.

And he takes out the yellowing song
from where it lies in the flat drawer

He might hear now how Arhippa sang,
at the sight of an old man's boat
sliding down a pathway of birches
and over a causeway of pines.
In the afternoon after a silent lunch
he falls dead and the telegraph hums
to Helsinki The halls are silenced
by the guest conductor from England.
Aino covers the old man's hollow face.


Lakhsmi Bai and Virangani Jhalkari At Jhansi

The charred double doors to the Jhansi
British hospital are opened. People stand.
The Rani, in burial clothes, brought out,
by station staff officers, in remand.
She had become the freedom fighters’
mission force against foreign footholds.
She passes crowds as her story unfolds.

That self-possessed, dead glance appears rapt
and attentive to her Lords. Her smiling lips
deceive even herself, as she slips
between her two God-brothers. Her eclipse
joins their divinity and personhood,
while subalterns stack arid sandalwood.

The pungent fumes of paraffin-soaked fuel
blind the gathered crowd of mission johnnies
and the fire itself, burning to overrule
the searing sun, seems to slacken the breeze.
A Hundu Goddess has found release
to tear the navels out of British officers,
European brutes, without guns, or reserves.

Their forgotten blood dissolves in the Straits.
Now the ex-equerry to the Duke of Cambridge,
pays homage to her courage.She illuminates
useful illusions that can conveniently abridge
all conflict and be put to rest with shortage
scattering of boiled sweets. While justified
in himself, the General grasps an unsure honour.

He fells worlds with urbane whimsy, seeking
immanent testament from a dead peasant girl.
The district superintendants, bark at the British
other ranks that they keep their distance.
Children hurl abuse.Ram's pearls,
won in a day of breaking old weapons,
enter the flames unflinching in response.


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