3 poems of mutability

On the recent passing of my friend and mentor

José Faur

Most great men I have known I never met,

a few encountered through the profane word,

and some in passing visits, like a thousand bats

emerging from a cavern in darkness, heard

in screeching stampedes, not as coherent thoughts,

the distance of the inscribed voice, but he

was different; for we sat and  chatted through

many an afternoon in Jerusalem; when we

parted and returned to quiet unspoken words,

the sentences gained a resonance to call

from the depths of prophecy, like lonely birds

who sing to each other inside their hidden worlds,

no longer chattering; we spoke as angels

do in the heavenly void, creating spells

in a superabundance of secret words

as yet beyond all natural languages,

emerging from the dark sub-lunar otherness, and all

the liquid consciousness of unformed  dreams,

before there were baskets floating on the streams

of Eretz Mitzraim, a river of sacred monsters,

with lisping infants and plagues unimagined

and still unnumbered in unwritten scrolls.

In memory of Lloyd Demause, Friend and Mentor

You liked to tease and yet were patient, came

When bullies rose up out of the audience.

We met rarely but wrote often, argued

And challenged, as a mentor ought, without blame.

At times, in a darkened restaurant, the sense

Of what you meant cut quick into my soul.

And I would ponder over the years; or, glued

Your ideas on to my own until they merged;

And even oceans and continents apart,

Before I framed a sentence and honed a proof,

Your critical voice, out of my pen, emerged

To make me think again. We were never heart

To heart, but you were always in my words, aloof

When necessary to chastise me, or deep enough

To comfort me in silence, confusion and doubt.

Fire and Flood

While others have fought forest fires, shovel

In hand, as flames tunnelled underground,

Burning through twisted roots, it is a marvel

When something burns unseen for months, no sound

Of crackling or the hiss of gasses comes unbound

And slices through soil and bracken, a devil

In the sparks that suddenly erupt. And some

Dig deeply into swollen river banks

To make a breach and open a sluice, or plumb

Into a hidden current, anything that ranks

As flood control, some powerful pressures come

Out of the secret channels of the earth, like tanks

Across a field of trenches unseen over the Somme

Bloated with a million muddied corpses, dumb

And dreamless, thus their nations’ forgotten thanks,

To build a bridge or raft with coffin planks.