Poem for All Those Suffering from the Violence in the 'Middle East'

When One Is on the Verge of Leaving the World

When one is on the verge of leaving this world

the stresses on the atmosphere are increasing,

and the war-makers gloat over their annihilations

and many others die quicker than it takes for 

your own death to complete its cycle, even when

it’s ‘mini-stroke’ after ‘mini-stroke’ and you’ve 

only got one eye to the world. In the time between 

emergency and operation, in the time blood 

pressure drops critically in ICU to be persuaded 

to rise but not rise too far, the killers have killed 

so many others, with or without ‘pre-existing

conditions’ (other than living), and some repairing

from ailments, others just finding a way through

to dawn. These lives all terminated, these lives

burnt in the name of other lives and also to show-

case hardware, to make an exhibition of power.

When one is on the verge of leaving this world,

bushland is replaced by a playing field on which

a ball moves between profiles, the slices of life.

John Kinsella

Celebrating Kwame Dawes

The following poem is taken from Kwame Dawes' and my forthcoming collection with Peepal Tree, Mortality. I post it here to celebrate Kwame's superb collection Sturge Town, originally published with Peepal Tree in the UK and out in August with Norton in the USA. I also celebrate his generosity of spirit in dialoguing with me about poetry and poetics over the last decade. Kwame's poetry works to offer ways through the contradictions and crises of physical existence while maintaining its role as witness. A complex sense of the spiritual shifts and aligns with both personal and collective timelines making it a deeply focussed engagement with self, family, 'place', music, literature, 'the arts', politics, friendship and communities.

49.

This is a day when your “being out there”
makes all the difference for me, Kwame.
    I read your poem and journey
with it, if not with you. I am not limited
to my own perceptions, care of your grace

and generosity. Your poems increase me
as prayer or contemplation does, and in
    other ways that transition across
language, across topographies 
and demographics. I see remarkable

things after reading them, disturbing
things after reading them, and follow
    the branching roots of each line
simultaneously. Sky, people, and earth.
Lives encountered and recounted.

And on this day when your “being out there”
makes all the difference, we here contemplate
    the months to come – said to be the worst
summer before it has even got fully under-
way. Each day we prepare until we are at its end.

We’ve known each other long enough now, Kwame,
to note the variations in repetitions, the way
    cycles loop over themselves and entangle.
We know the limits and incredible
expansiveness of action, and we know

each other’s atmospheres of mortality.
Every poem is a surprise and a confirmation.
    Every poem is the one that follows 
and starts our conversation over again.
This pattern holds it shape, then doesn’t.

    John Kinsella

"Now he is gone..."

Posted by Tracy, for a friend who passed away this week.

Thomas Hardy, "Afterwards"

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
'He was a man who used to notice such things'?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
'To him this must have been a familiar sight.'

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, 'He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.'

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
'He was one who had an eye for such mysteries'?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
'He hears it not now, but used to notice such things'?