An Old Man in Winter

Solitude of stone

Grimness of flame

Oh winter,

You and I

Are all that remain.

Come, draw near

Together, we will jeer

We will scorn them –

They who were too weak

To shoulder history;

They who were tamed by triviality,

And left us to our noble misery

They who took cowardly refuge

In the delusion of joy;

They who played footmen

To God’s pitiless ploy

They who compromised,

They who faltered

They who pined for perfection

And then spurned it at the altar.

And let us save our best contempt,

For the intellectually unkempt

Fools who fell prey to the birdsong of doves

And retreated into the safeguards of love.

Come, winter, we will laugh,

Spit on summer’s epitaph.

My friend, you have been my steadiest comrade

And in my lifelong charade,

You have played many a part

Wife, mistress and sweetheart;

So help me partake in this last sad pantomime

As we while away our dwindling time.

In defiance

Of pomp, circumstance and pleasance

You and I will remain

Locked in valiant refrain

And we will endure this eternal night,

With the friendship of the fire-light

Come, winter, we will feed its gleams

With the dying embers of our dreams.

The Shortest Meeting

One fine day in the forest

The animals gathered for a meeting,

They all did, from the smallest to the tallest

(Except for the Hippo, who was home eating).

They all seemed rather peeved;

You see, the Squirrel of all people

Had asked them to assemble,

And the summons was ill-received.

The Bear looked quite cranky

And had only honey on his mind,

“What is this hanky-panky?”

Demanded the grouchy Vulture from behind.

The Elephant lazily slouched

Sipping a pail of water,

While a surly Gecko grouched

As the summer sun grew hotter.

The Owls were asleep, without a clue

And the Possum was playing dead,

Though he probably would be in a minute or two

Because the Python was eyeing his head.

The Squirrel leapt on to a rock

And squealed for their attention

“Please, my friends, let me talk

If I may have your kind permission.”

The Jackal sniggered at his words

As soon as they’d been said,

But the kind and tolerant Birds

Encouraged him to go ahead.

“There is an issue of grave importance

That I wish to discuss…”

(Sadly he couldn’t finish the sentence

As he developed a bad case of hiccups.)

He bounced around making strange sounds

And tried to regain his thread,

But not a soul from Bat to Bloodhound

Could understand a word he said.

Gasping and choking, to the ground he sunk

And squeaked to the Elephant, “Give me your water!”

The tusker flew into a rage, and whipped the poor soul with his trunk

You see, he’d misheard “water” as “daughter”.

So ended the shortest meeting in history

And the other animals all lived a long and happy life

Because they had learnt the moral of the story

That being,

In future fits of hiccupping

At least don’t ask to borrow the Elephant’s knife.

Colours in the Sky

Huddled in their brittle caves

They watched the twilight come

They watched the waters and the waves

They watched till they were numb.

Fingers clawing at the sky

And the nightly wind that blew,

They saw the dust and omens fly

And knew the end was due.

Cries and quivers reached their ears

The Nations had assembled;

The rising tides would hide their tears

But what if their caves crumbled?

Huddled under the melting sun

They waited for the night

They waited for the blood to run

They waited for the light.

Clever the kings, but ever they knaves

And so the flags were hoisted high;

And only they who crouched in their caves

Saw the colours in the sky.

Childish Fancies

When the thorns were picked
From the paths we trod
And we had no shoes to fill,
When the wind and light
Were slaves to our fancy
And our dreams were ours to kill;

Love and beauty were petty farces
Reserved for merry fables
And pain was but the pithy realm
Of toes stubbed on tables

When death was a quaint oddity
(We were born immortal
And made our plans hence)
It all had purpose, colour and sound
And the grass was always greenest
On our side of the fence.

The rapt hours we spent
Lost in a firefly’s blinking mystique
The outcasts we laughed with
Without censure or critique

Splendid dreams of night
Earnest dreams of day;
Have all our childish fancies
Fallen by the way?

Our forever dissolved so quickly
Our never came so soon;
When was it that we stopped looking
For the witch flying past the moon?

Deja Vu

What is that light, I wonder?

As the fog clouds my eyes;

Is it whole or asunder,

Atop that mountain of ice?

What is that noise, I inquire?

As the forests thicken in my path;

The crackling of a fire,

Or the bubbling of a bath?

What lurks, what crouches, what glides?

On the edge of my sight;

What whispers on those jagged sides,

And cackles in the night?

The boughs are gnarled, the woods twisted

And puddles drain away;

The change of wind is resisted,

And a humid breeze holds sway.

At long last the trail dwindles,

A welcome sight for man;

But it ends in fearsome circles,

For alas, it’s where we first began.

The Wordsmith

Walking the night-black moor

He was the zephyr in the meadows,

He was the amalgam of chance

A continuum of moon-shadows.

Playing the midnight flute

He was the music of the ages,

He was the footprint of the dawn

The wisdom of the sages.

Climbing the evanescent hills

He was the scent of the flowers,

He was the dew on the ramparts

An echo of bygone lovers.

Dimming with the stars

He was the early fall,

He was a waking dream

The reason for it all.

In a shroud outside our sight

He was, is, and will be

He is chaos, death, life, serenity

The wordsmith of continuity.

Rome

The scarlet sun is aslant

On the frothing ocean’s edge;

The doomed sailors chant

As pledge begets pledge.

There has come a shivering blight

In dissent’s dying meadows,

And as dawn sheds off night

The soldiers become shadows.

The bridges will fall,

The walls will crumble;

The merchants are gone,

The kings are humbled.

The fires will forge a new day

Oh, but Rome burns today.

To the sleepy summer glades

The insidious blight has spread;

Like the plague descend the blades

And discontent is dead.

The mountains will stain

The rivers will dry;

They are listening for the rain

But they hear a battle-cry.

The bridges will fall,

The walls will crumble;

The wolves will call,

The thunder will rumble.

The fires will forge a new day

Oh, but Rome burns today.

Rome burns

Today.