Keith Shorrocks Johnson - Poems
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Poetry Series Keith Shorrocks Johnson - poems - Publication Date: 2020 Publisher: Poemhunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive Keith Shorrocks Johnson(9th June 1944) I am an Economist and Public Policy Analyst by profession who has worked in over 25 countries during a 40-year career. In 1991, I settled in Wellington, New Zealand, having lived and worked in the Philippines for the previous seven years. Nowadays I am largely a house-husband and the principal carer for 2 small sons. As I am semi-retired from policy work, I write extensively in my spare time. www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 1 "All Shall Be Well - And All Manner Of Things Shall Be Well. I pray my rosary in feeling, touch, sight - Three properties of God's revelation - The sensations of Life, Love and Light Come to hand, come to mind in meditation. In life is marvelous homeliness In love is gentle courtesy And in light is endless naturehood. These properties are within one goodness To which I hold fast wisely and mightily: Night is the cause of pain and our distress And light stands against it discreetly - needfully In life is wonderful vitality In love is gracious redemption And in light essential clarity. Our faith is the dawning of endless day www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 2 In sweet accord as our blindness is lifted And by that light we see the sovereign way By which our unity with God is gifted. In life are all things created one In love there is no separation And in light we see the source. Keith Shorrocks Johnson www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 3 12 Hours by Alexander Blok [a bespoke ‘translation' for my friend Olga Kolokolova] When you are trapped or driven down by people, cares or longing: when the casket lid seems to close - all that you want is to be able to sleep. The city is deserted And desperate and sick you need to go home - your eyelashes are heavy with frost - Stop for a moment - listen to the silence of the night that sound is strange - separate and apart from the noise of daytime. Glance with fresh eyes at the snowy streets, the smoke of a fire, as night waits quietly for the morning above the whitened garden - and the sky is the cover of an open book - you will find the soul is ready for a story from your childhood. And in this incomparable moment when the frost patterns the glass of the lamp but chills the blood - love will flare up into gratitude and blessings for others. You realize then that life is more than simply taking your fill - that the world itself is inherently beautiful. Keith Shorrocks Johnson www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 4 20th January 2017 Too old to cruise in bars Or wait for a booty-call, I am past clever hopes That flirting in dives Is other than dishonesty Or that obsessing In poetic pretense About the darkening Of our public discourse Will serve a sound purpose: I only note the half truths. If scholarship can explain The myths and trauma That undermine sanity And drive a polity to cruelty Linking ‘being your own priest' To the sham and shame Of Theriesenstadt, I have to ask: Who is to blame That America, so much used As it is to success and luxury, Is so blind to separation? Thucydides warned Against democracy Being subverted By poets and orators But he was unexposed To the trite rubbish Of twittering and trolling And the formation of tribes That promote discrimination Spreading hatred and division Making light of others' suffering. At the centre of things Where money talks There are silences www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 5 As the price of dissent Is factored in to stocks: If taxes are lowered And regulations laid aside There will be profits, So that integrity Becomes an option For mendacious henchmen. Estranged from quiet conviviality Out for a good time, up for it, Getting the rush, posing the self, Posting a squeak of presence, Oblivious to the thinning crowd In a garish, decaying fairground, This is how things fall apart - The pussy-footing at the dismantling Of the reciprocities that kept us safe - Vermin foraging the crumbs of decency That could lead the lost home. But it is true that love is dangerous And that we all crave adoration Aspiring to centre-stage folies de deux: It seems that Nijnsky wrote About Diaghilev: "I loved him sincerely and, When he told me that The love of women was a terrible thing, I believed him'. This is then the task, to hope for love But set aside distinction and perfection. In the darkness that is gathering Ethics have become footnotes And those who care for the future Intone "I will be true to myself, But let me rest before the test" And those in authority ignore The welfare of the weak: "Cursed are the meek For they shall inherit a deficit www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 6 Of understanding and respect And retain not even the little they have". And Auden later repudiated The voice in which he folded The romantic lie that We must all love one another or die Because he sensed the reality That we do exist alone, filed away In suburbs and skyscrapers Trying to find our voice But unable to push away the gag Stuffed down our throats By a calculating culture. For sure, there is stupor enough: We don't love each other Well or even at all for the most part, And raising a glass of rye In irony and a nod to empathy Is a poor substitute for Seeing others as we would Want to be seen, or shaking Off the dust of negation And the confusions of lust To extend a helping hand. Keith Shorrocks Johnson www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 7 27 Days On Friday 24th September 1943 My father wrote a letter To his brother in which He described how my mother Had joined him during the previous weekend At Silecroft in Cumbria As he took a few hours leave from RAF Millom where he was Training on Avro Ansons To join a Lancaster Bomber Squadron That would take the war home to Berlin. I was born on 9th June 1944 And the babyMed Calculator Puts my conception date as Around Friday 17th September 1943, With sex likely no more Than a week earlier at the most So I think we can pretty much agree That it was the Friday, and incidentally In the following June I was also Born on a Friday - ‘with far to go'. So here's the sad part He was killed 14th October 1943. This means an overlap Of 27 days which is hardly a blink. Just now my third and fourth sons Who are eleven and twelve years-old Have come in for cuds in their jimjams Having interrupted my musings Lucky me, lucky them But it's good to remember those 27 days And let the four of us share looks and hugs. Keith Shorrocks Johnson www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 8 A Bond For Summer Versed In Bonuses [Another Poem for Clive James] These I will celebrate: The searching bursts of crocuses Daffodils that spring to sunny hours In promise that the primrose flowers Maia's gerbils and the garden's squirrel An impish acrobat and thief named Cyril The migrant birds the welcome ground receives And those who lingered winter long in clefts and eaves A bond for summer versed in bonuses. Keith Shorrocks Johnson www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 9 A Brief Heads-Up On That Maori Fellah J.C. I saw your mate again today J.K. He was on the quay near the TSB arena And we had a brief chat - he's looking well - Hair in dreads with a lost front tooth. He tells me he's working for J.T. Crouch The foundation and construction outfit On replacing the wharf-side piling That was totalled by the last earthquake. He still looks more than good for a few beers. I told him that you had written a poem about him And that like as not I would write another To put you two back in touch. It seems that he's got his life back together With a new woman who has a couple of kids And apart from the odd fracas In the Zoo Bar in Newtown, things are looking up. As for the twelve disciples The call-girl met an old fella who set her up with a shop In the arcade off the Left Bank in Cuba Street But the housewife who forgot the Pill Is working her arse off providing cheap-thrills For pick-ups somewhere behind Courtenay Place. He's lost touch with the queen and the alky-priest And most of the others, apart from one who Just got elected to Parliament under Labour. That'll be a bloody miracle: I'll sing along with that one! Behind him the harbour was still glorious It was kind of crisp and bright and luminous And as the conversation trailed He shrugged his broken-tooth killer smile. I had meant to ask him about persecution And redemption and revelation And shock-treatment and the end of the world And the mile-deep civilised dystopia Where the flickering light in the void www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 10 Is being snuffed out by mountainous darkness But the option was closed by his ‘Nice One - See You Mate'.