The Poet and the Human World

The poet may of the tragic stock be
Never will he of the greedy stock be
He may out of choice a god worship
Never will he cheer the deeds of a warship
Songs calling the downfall of a tyrant he does tune
But dirges to bury the tyrannised his entrails at noon
Spew
For all, not a few!
The flaw of trusting his foible is
The breach of trust from his love, his tragedy is.
A poet is a poet
Human and poet
And a child though
He of mud makes dough,
In pain has one love
In joy has one love
In writing shares either pain or joy
Or both; for men with these toy
Espousing the things of this world
Far removed from his world.

TO MUSIC

Music has sung my life
From the wild dances
With my laughing sister
To the many melodies
I dream over with my wife.

With gentle or violent hands
They have lifted us both
To leave us dreaming
Caught in the wraiths
Of distant unknown lands.

And there our love has wandered
From string to pipe and drum,
From Vivaldi's vigour and force
To the magnificent rigour of Beethoven
Where the great melodies come.

And so great and noble Art,
You have kept our love alive,
Captured in your deep heart's soul
Climbing the heights and plumbing the depths
Always together, never to part.

©Peter H.W.Brooker.

Plume in a Jar

Early in the morning, driving past
Thinking not I’d see a die cast
With full blown sun on the horizon
Driving thoughts of layers of ozone
I three balloons saw in the air
And a winged flock towards them their way did stir
Divinely soaring
And imperially laughing
And I did gasp: gee!
Who? Me? Let’s see!
Would someone of the holy, holy
Trinity
Tell them
Or tell them
Of the arms checking
And balancing
Each of the three trumps in our deck
Hanging on each others neck!
Freely, the balloons, in the air floated
And freely in the air, at pariahs the birds gloated
Catching a view of them at dead ends scavenging
For earthly salvation scavenging
While a king atop a throne
With a load from afar happily groomed and grown;
Dropping one of their feathers in a jar,
The birds ordered a song for the bar
Behind which king and groomer
Will stand to share the shroud of Mr Deceiver
The which the poet in me hurriedly picked
Before he could on the butt be kicked.

INTERVENTION A sonnet

How patiently my chessmen wait
In serried ranks upon their board!
''Front rank steady! Rear rank steady!''
And steadfast there they all will stand
Until at last some human hand
Intervenes,launching some heady
Attack so they can show their hoard
of subtle moves through check to mate.

And so it was with rock and air and troubled sea
Waiting and wasting through what seemed eternity
Heading always towards a duller entropy.
No divine hand was then,no Plan to win or fail,
Until at last life came,that little life so frail
That from their waste made elephant and whale.


© Peter H.W.Brooker. 2006

Wrath to the world.

Shivering out in the storm, up in the sky
a cover of dark angry clouds my attention caught,
with their beauty touching me, as they moved across,
the sun’s face, bringing darkness and chill.

As if spewed from the mouth of a hateful ogre, aiming
his wrath at the world, a wind so fierce and unfeeling
to all in its path, moved closer, thus pounding like angry waves
as they crashed on the rocks of a distant shore
Chilling my soul with its hateful claw.
My jacket I zipped up to my chin
to warm my body within .

Palms bend as if bowing to a master, thin fronds like
unprotected maidens hair was blown about.
Jacaranda pods, shattered limbs, crushed leaves,
blooms that yesterday were admired by many.
My thoughts move to other times & to people in far off lands,
Shattered limbs, ruined lives, bodies here and there, left
by cruel soldiers, and masters that did not care,
These were the blooms many admired yesterday.



© Joy Naomi Brooker 2008

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