BETTER THAN MORTAL FLOWERS An anthology of poems chosen by Stephen Jackson Better than Mortal Flowers Page 1 JODRELL BANK * Who were they, what lonely men Imposed on the fact of night The fiction of constellations And made commensurable The distances between Themselves, their loves, and their doubt Of governments and nations? Who made the dark stable When the light was not? Now We receive the blind codes Of spaces beyond the span Of our myths, and a long dead star May only echo how There are no loves nor gods Men can invent to explain How lonely all men are. Patric Dickinson (England, born 1914) * Jodrell Bank, on a site in the Cheshire countryside, was a commission by the University of Manchester – and it was, at the time of its completion in the late 1950‘s, the largest and most powerful radio telescope in the world. It was derided by the British public and media alike (as ―a waste of money‖) until its uniquely successful interception of radio messages from Sputnik and USSR moon probes - Stephen Jackson EVERNESS One thing does not exist: Oblivion. God saves the metal and he saves the dross, And his prophetic memory guards from loss The moons to come, and those of evenings gone. Better than Mortal Flowers Page 2 Everything is: the shadows in the glass Which, in between the day‘s two twilights, you Have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew Henceforward in the mirrors that you pass. And everything is part of that diverse Crystalline memory, the universe; Whoever through its endless mazes wanders Hears door on door click shut behind his stride, And only from the sunset‘s farther side Shall view at last the Archetypes and the Splendours. Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina, 1899-1986) LEVIATHAN This is the black sea-brute bulling through wave-wrack, Ancient as ocean‘s shifting hills, who in sea-toils Travelling, who furrowing the salt acres Heavily, his wake hoary behind him, Shoulders spouting, the fist of his forehead Over wastes grey-green crashing, among horses unbroken From bellowing fields, past bone-wreck of vessels, Tide-ruin, wash of lost bodies bobbing No longer sought for, and islands of ice gleaming, Who ravening the rank flood, wave-marshalling, Overmastering the dark sea-marches, finds home And harvest. Frightening to foolhardiest Mariners, his size were difficult to describe: The hulk of him is like hills heaving, Dark, yet as crags of drift-ice, crowns cracking in thunder, Like land‘s self by night black-looming, surf churning and trailing Along his shores‘ rushing, shoal-water boding About the dark of his jaws; and who should moor at his edge And fare on afoot would find gates of no gardens, But the hill of dark underfoot diving, Closing overhead, the cold deep, and drowning. He is called Leviathan, and named for rolling, Better than Mortal Flowers Page 3 First created he was of all creatures, He has held Jonah three days and nights, He is that curling serpent that in ocean is, Sea-fright he is, and the shadow under the earth. Days there are, nonetheless, when he lies Like an angel, although a lost angel On the waste‘s unease, no eye of man moving, Bird hovering, fish flashing, creature whatever Who after him came to herit earth‘s emptiness. Froth at flanks seething soothes to stillness, Waits; with one eye he watches Dark of night sinking last, with one eye dayrise As at first over foaming pastures. He makes no cry Though that light is a breath. The sea curling, Star-climbed, wind-combed, cumbered with itself still As at first it was, is the hand not yet contented Of the Creator. And he waits for the world to begin. W S Merwin (USA, born 1927) COSMOGONY Cosmic Leviathan, that monstrous fish, stirred in his ancient sleep, begins to dream; and out of nothingness dishevelled suns crawl, with live planets tangled in their hair. And through the valleys of those phantom worlds some pursue shadows painfully and grasp the husks they see, and name one Rose, and one Willow, that leans and whispers over pools. They speak of mountains reared and crashing seas and forests that seem older than the hills; or meet a maiden-shade and plan with her sojourn and rapture in Eternity. Better than Mortal Flowers Page 4 Slowly the sunrise breaks beyond those hills, by waveless seas; and in the golden light, heavy with his long sleep Leviathan splashes, and half recalls a waking dream. Edgell Rickword (England, 1898-1982) STARS AND PLANETS Trees are cages for them: water holds its breath To balance them without smudging on its delicate meniscus. Children watch them playing in their heavenly playground; Men use them to lug ships across oceans, through firths. They seem so twinkle-still, but they never cease Inventing new spaces and huge explosions And migrating in mathematical tribes over The steppes of space at their outrageous ease. It‘s hard to think that the earth is one – This poor sad bearer of wars and disasters Rolls-Roycing round the sun with its load of gangsters, Attended only by the loveless moon. Norman McCaig (Scotland, 1910-1996) WE ARE MADE ONE WITH WHAT WE TOUCH AND SEE We are resolved into the supreme air, We are made one with what we touch and see, With our heart's blood each crimson sun is fair, With our young lives each spring-impassioned tree Better than Mortal Flowers Page 5 Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change. With beat of systole and of diastole One grand great life throbs through earth's giant heart, And mighty waves of single Being roll From nerve-less germ to man, for we are part Of every rock and bird and beast and hill, One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill. One sacrament are consecrate, the earth Not we alone hath passions hymeneal, The yellow buttercups that shake for mirth At daybreak know a pleasure not less real Than we do, when in some fresh-blossoming wood We draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that life is good. Is the light vanished from our golden sun, Or is this daedal-fashioned earth less fair, That we are nature‘s heritors, and one With every pulse of life that beats the air? Rather new suns across the sky shall pass, New splendour come unto the flower, new glory to the grass. And we two lovers shall not sit afar, Critics of nature, but the joyous sea Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be Part of the mighty universal whole, And through all Aeons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul! We shall be notes in that great Symphony Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres, And all the live World's throbbing heart shall be One with our heart, the stealthy creeping years Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die, The Universe itself shall be our Immortality! Oscar Wilde (Ireland-UK, 1854–1900) Better than Mortal Flowers Page 6 CORRESPONDENCES Nature is a temple, where the living Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech; Man walks within these groves of symbols, each Of which regards him as a kindred thing. As the long echoes, shadowy, profound, Heard from afar, blend in a unity, Vast as the night, as sunlight‘s clarity, So perfumes, colours, sounds may correspond. Odours there are, fresh as a baby‘s skin, Mellow as oboes, green as meadow grass, - Others corrupted, rich, triumphant, full, Having dimensions infinitely vast, Frankincense, musk, ambergris, benjamin, Singing the senses‘ rapture, and the soul‘s. Charles Baudelaire: from Les Fleurs Du Mal From AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE To see the world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour… William Blake (Lines 1-4 only) Better than Mortal Flowers Page 7 HIGH WINDOWS When I see a couple of kids And guess he‘s fucking her and she‘s Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives - Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought, That‟ll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest. He And his lot will all go down the long slide Like free bloody birds. And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless. Philip Larkin 12 February 1967: High Windows IN THE MICROSCOPE Here too are dreaming landscapes, lunar, derelict. Here too are the masses, tillers of the soil. And cells, fighters Better than Mortal Flowers Page 8 who lay down their lives for a song. Here too are cemeteries, fame and snow. And I hear murmuring, the revolt of immense estates. Miroslav Holub (Czech Republic: born 1923). From Day Duty (1958) THE COMET O still withhold thyself, be not possessed: Hyperbola, the dread uncharted line, Debase not into orbit; still make shine Portentous rays of arrowy unrest Among the earthy planets. Know not law, Here are too many who lie straightly bound: Fly all but in the sun, and shooting round Dart to the outer darkness of our awe: And if there be incalculable return, Come in another shape with monstrous hair Or triple train enclosing half the skies: Still let thy face with various omens burn, Still shun the reasoned pathways to despair, Nor answerable be to earthly eyes.