The Satires by Duncan McGibbon (free ebook reader TXT) 📕

cannot trust,
the daughter fierce, the night time vague, the bed unmade,
would it were not so, would it another place and idleness my trade.


 
Third Book of Satires


Jacob’s Ladder


Searching for the Sense

1.Festival.

The flat full of the casual
effects of making words,
books strewn open,
spent clothes, helpless
on the homeless floor
to which I have returned.


Ulster voices, set high
on the Geneva radio;
a journalist’s toy.
It makes a good story;
the marching season
tamed by a daycent
concert or so;
drowned out by
the lambeg
of poverty on hate.
They will find
someone to kill.

You can be sure of that.
Death, like any church,
is a sign of itself.

2005

2.Poetry Day

The particularity of poetry that must be recognized is that it does not
convey clear words that can be instantly grasped, but constructs new,
unprecedented forms of language that owe nothing to common codes.
M. Koechiro Matsuura, Directeur General de l’UNESCO, a l’occasion
de la Journee Mondiale de la Poesie, 21 mars 2007

They have reprocessed them, the GM poets,
those tongues of awe; grown transgenic
dictators of freedom, they can no longer
infect us with the imperfection of hope.
We lie in the water now, no longer a threat,
our signatures on the surface, so visible
on poisoned cataracts across the world. .

2007


3.From a Lithuanian Folk-Song

Wolf-craft kills the calf.
Fox-craft kills the hen.
Dog-craft scares the thief.
Flea-craft wakes the worker.
Bee-craft stings the bear
and gives us honey.
Man-craft stings the heart
and gives no honey.

2007

At Ferney

We are less happy now and new estates
approach Voltaire's chateau and his stone church.
Your age of sensual freedom came in search
of pleasure, thought new hopes; now Middle Classes
with different aims and Gucci glasses
focus on old loves and blur new hates.

Candide left us his garden, then betrayed us
just as surely as the Old Regime.
destroyed the dignity and self-esteem
of men and women in a past of dated
sophistries and systematic decorated
violence. His inheritance undoes

the slow drift of rights against dictators.
Voltaire knew revolt, not revolution
old lore, bad rulers, cruel punition.
Now all have passed away, leaving a plight
in our hearts, that self-destructive blight
that runs from European anti fascist wars

to the Islamophobic international.
Diderot and Rousseau are long dead.
D'Alembert and Maupertuis unread.
and all along there is one enemy,
the vicious human heart's ignominy
that poisons all in us that we think rational.

The garden Voltaire paid to look like Pope's,
the secret passageway he took when visitors
outstayed their welcome; the registers
proving him a crook, despite his God of thought
and this estate for worthies his corruption bought;
The people keep them, not to honour monied hopes

but to keep a style awake, a confidence
that kept you writing too, left you free
to think tradition inside out, no mimicry
of past illusions.I honour your humour
and honour Voltaire's too, not Deist stupor,
or priapal dogmas of sensual pretence.

In this house lived a man who wrote
and to it came another of like trade.
Both grew in strength to master the tirade
against those brutal fronts of history
that justified injustice as sacred mystery,
for whose brave styles the people's shoes still vote.

1999

Interior Psalm 3

What on earth do you want now?
I’m not taking any more rides
to fascinating landscapes,
or museums of frozen imagination.
I’m not cruising those parties
of the sad and the rich
whose language I am
forgetting to speak.
I don’t go to the great,
empty houses where
decision-makers smile
at my guileless thoughts,
or cut me dead.
I wanted to live
on the surface of my hopes
away from significance
and its innocent victims
away from the projects
of happiness and
their duped clients,
away from the counselors
of sanity and their tearful
waiting rooms.
Ground level means
you cannot see beyond
the curve the earth makes
to keep going and I do not want
to see beyond my being
and then you come
rising from the other side
that’s also beautiful
and say you’ve found me.


Virga
“If the cloud is high, the air warm and dry, and the raindrops small, so that they fall slowly, they may evaporate completely before they reach the earth. If they do so, the drops are called virga.
From: The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition 2007, Rain

Hazard raindrops spatter on the skylight.
All is what it seems to be, the cat asleep
on the dry armchair, the garden wall
overgrown with fruiting ivy, the slanting
roofs of terraced houses with redundant
chimneys, pillared against a woollen sky.
Yet we do not own the times we live in
any more, as the dead did, presumed
more primitive, in the extant past.
Each day's survivors ate, slept and bought
the necessary hours from vicar, beadle
or master. Their future was modelled
precisely on some carved and ornate presence.
Even the thinkers sought to elucidate
the present only to better a yesterday wprld.
Now we manufacture rival futures.
for we have more possibilities
than raindrops falling in the cubic
airspace of this South London suburb.
We can add years to our lives,
not subtract them from brutish death.
We can turn the planet on and
off like a light-bulb. We can play-off
God, with genes and leave the table.
All we have lost is that intimate
belonging to the certainties
that gave us our place in time.
Poverty alone does not confer it.
Electric hands have stripped the poor
of their own simple dignity.
Once, though ranked, we prayed life together.
We were happier once, despite fear.
Now our poetry is a virga raindrop
that dries before it falls. We cannot tell
tears from blessings, nor add up the rainfall
on old habitations, as new eyes cannot
see old rain, nor our shoulders take its weight.

Transmission

It was easy getting through the tide of Solar flares.
Beyond the arcing spout of Helium, it seems the Sun
has planets each with its own merit and
attraction. From one we can take methane,
from another argon. X-rays abound.
Our little ones will smile to learn about
the thermonuclear springs we promised them.
Yet I must warn Control against the use of this
far-flung and so richly favoured system .
As I was cruising low over a bright
blue and white world, I saw creatures like
our pet scorpions with mobile fibres
frenzied with activity. They have all
the talents needed to accomplish love,
a phrase they use that seems to bear no sense.
And yet their energy is sapped unless
they have the time to witness closed colonies
in which the withering away of dignity
and life is witnessed by a crowd so huge,
it must provide mass fascination.
Further they have developed rituals
of destruction no intelligence known
could be the equal of and yet they kill
their own kind for this communal sport.
They sing of it, report of it with tears
and yet promote it by the very means
that could prevent it. Even their best
are kept in cages. Often waiting complex
folds of time before enduring what I’d call
an art form of annihilation.
Others in their millions are left to fade
under the glare of footlights and cameras
which extend the pleasure even to their homes.
This is no world for our simple lifestyle.
No force I’ve met in the universe can help.
I have obliterated this account from
all the channels save this brief encryption
that only final breakdown can access,
clearing my cobalt heart of the reek
of these polluted heavens, glad I shall
expire before I reach you and a chance
accidental word should slip my mouth
about this region and its horror kill.

 
2004

Toxic Assets

I saw them all, McCaig, Hewitt, Heaney
and Muldoon. Frost, Kavanagh and Hughes,
sniffing the spines of each others’ books
for the real mud, the whiff of myth, high on
smoking landscapes, unaware their fix
was dealt them from the same academic chair
they thought they had escaped while Real
Estate dealers priced their vistas for the
Sunday glossies, converting myth
to mortgages all at the latest rates.

2005


Jacob's Ladder

1.

What would you
have me be
sincere to?

My next omission?
My next rebuff?

Obscure my obscurity?
Silence my silence?

Should I leave
the pages
of this notebook blank?

Right now
the pendulum
swings for
the stricken,
the poor, the rude
and the hurt.

I who speak
of the unseen
dead,

the genetic
market place,
that deals on-screen,
through the prying
lenses of a science
that has coded fantasy,

while news-
gangers mouths
spit justice
and the culture
of protest
swings to the tunes
of oppression.

2.

The business
of poverty
turns profitable.
The MBA people
gather in the halls
like insects
at the perfume
of the dead.
De-consecrated, their
sons and daughters
will rasp in anger
and crunch
the smooth gears
of the Campus,
the Party
and the Corporation.
They will dig up
their parents' hearts
to show
they never
beat at all.

3.

I will turn poetry
into ice, into its
animal soul;
my veins open
to the thrill of
pure water.
I am the son
of cliff edges
of rational isolations
and their horror
of settled thought,
where the living
do not know me.

4.

I will be a bull
for young poets,
bucking them from
smug armchairs,
those subsidied
hirelings,
dithering at the landfill
of the imagination.
My sweat discolours
the print of their books,
my muzzle rocks the fences
of their slender spines.

5.

I can only be
a function
of my habitat
of my stubborn,
classless faith.
Remember
the charity-shop
in Twickenham
where I found
a copy of
Elie Halèvy.
I looked up
his footnote
on The Place
of Catholicism
in Victorian
England
and learnt
his conclusion
it had no place
at all.

6.

We have only
the Dream of Jacob,
in this dreadful place,
the feudal shimmer of Waugh,
the village virtue of Tolkien,
Greenes' urban hells.
The rest is the tidal pull
of secular bigotry,
Anglican carpentry
and a slow
lazy drift
into
the pig-sty
of self-esteem,
the rancid sewer
of individuation.

None will be
without sanction
in this time
where we have
more riches
than the sum
of the wealthy past.
And more die
of want
than ever
lived before.

7.

We perch
on a barrier reef
of excess.
The apron impinges,
to lurch
from Aukland,
sloping in flights
to Melbourne
and Sydney fringes
vanishes until
it rears up
from Hawaii
in a ribbon of Tokyo
and Osaka
and vanishing again
to re-emerge in the neon lights
of Vancouver
Toronto,
Denver,
New York,
London, Paris,
Berlin and Aachen.
It fringes St Petersburg,
Moscow,
Odessa
and diverts to
the Cape Town
and comes back
detoxified.
It is a surge
of carved
motorways,
eerie street-lights
and artialised
skyscrapers.
Like a pulsing
tapeworm
that feeds
so strong
on a dark ,
lagoon
of need,
a Stalag sinking
so long
under open greeds.
that tapers
into