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Farsi/Persian
Worry about money
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Wearing worry
about money like a hair shirt
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I lie down in
my bed and wrestle with my angel.
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My
bank-manager could not sanction my continuance for
another day
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But life
itself wakes me each morning, and love
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Urges me to
give although I have no money
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In the bank
at this moment, and ought properly
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To cease to
exist in a world where poverty
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Is a shameful
and ridiculous offence.
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Having no one
to advise me, I open the Bible
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And shut my
eyes and put my finger on a text
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And read that
the widow with the young son
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Must give
first to the prophetic genius
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From the
little there is in the bin of flour and the cruse of
oil.
Far-darting Apollo
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I saw the sun step like a
gentleman
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Dressed in black and proud
as sin.
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I saw the sun walk across
London
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Like a young M.
P., risen to the occasion.
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His step was
light, his tread was dancing,
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His lips were
smiling, his eyes glancing.
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Over the Cenotaph
in Whitehall
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The sun took the
wicket with my skull.
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The sun plays
tennis in the court of Geneva
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With the guts of
a Finn and the head of an Emperor.
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The sun plays
squash in a tomb of marble,
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The horses of
Apocalypse are in his stable.
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The sun plays a
game of darts in Spain
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Three by three in
flight formation.
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The invincible
wheels of his yellow car
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Are the discs
that kindle the Chinese war.
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The sun shows the
world to the world,
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Turns its own
ghost on the terrified crowd,
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Then plunges all
images into the ocean
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Of the nightly
mass emotion.
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Games of chance
and games of skill,
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All his sports
are games to kill.
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I saw the
murderer at evening lie
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Bleeding on his
death-bed sky.
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His hyacinth
breath, his laurel hair,
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His blinding
sight, his moving air,
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My love, my
grief, my weariness, my fears
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Hid from me in a
night of tears.
Lenten flowers
Primrose, anemone, bluebell, moss Grow
in the Kingdom of the Cross And the ash-tree's purple bud
Dresses the spear that sheds his blood.
With the thorns that pierce his brow
Soft encircling petals grow
For in each flower the secret lies
Of the tree that crucifies.
Garden by the water clear
All must die who enter
here!
TIME-LAG
Words spoken long ago, unheard,
unheeded then,
Voices of friends unprized in time's
day-to-day
Only now in this long after where I am
I have
heard messages, from one or another
Whose past is present
to me,
And before life-time memories,
Those spacious
regions of the mind,
That immemorial imagined land
Where
remembered words were spoken,
Heard here and now, a world
away.
Drawn to our times and places, who can
say
What law of that remembered country we obey,
Those
friends who come and go knowing no more than we
What
purposes join hands and hearts
From the ends of the earth,
from the beginning of time.
No truth of the
living,
Told or untold, can cease to be,
And will, on
some predestined day
Be understood, as I have
heard
Wisdom that circles the world
Spoken long ago by
loved familiar voices
In the beck
There is a fish, that quivers in the pool,
itself a shadow, but its shadow, clear.
Catch it again and again, it still is
there.
Against the flowing stream, its life keeps
pace
with death - the impulse and the flash of
grace
hiding in its stillness, moves to be
motionless.
No net will hold it - always it will return
Where the ripples settle, and the sand -
It lives unmoved, equated with the stream,
As flowers are fit for air, man for his
dream.
Seed
From star to star, from sun and spring and leaf,
And almost audible flowers whose sound is
silence,
And in the common meadows, springs the seed of
life.
Now the lilies open, and the rose
Released by summer from the harmless graves
That, centuries deep, are in the air we breathe,
And in our earth, and in our daily bread.
External and innate dimensions hold
The living forms, but not the force of life;
For that interior and holy tree
That in the heart of hearts outlives the world
Spreads earthly shade into
eternity.
Harvest
Day is the hero's shield,
Achilles' field,
The light days are the angels.
We the seed.
Against eternal light and gorgon's
face
Day is the shield
And we the grass
Native to fields of iron, and skies of
brass.
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