Buckley Hall

 

Well, we may as well sing

As the night is beckoning

And the old, pure heart

Remembers everything;

 

And we may as well pray

To the bright-dying day

That the ones the night has lost

Will somehow find their way;

 

For the night is very long,

And we only have a song

In the corner of the heart

Where the light is clear and strong.

 

There is pain in everything

That the speeding days will bring,

But the battle is not lost,

So we may as well sing.

The Ordinary Magic

 

His particular magic 

Would not set the sky ablaze,

Or heal the sick, or part the sea,

Or do anything much with snakes;

 

It was not given him

To divine the source of water,

See God in the entrails of a pigeon,

Summon rain to a dry land;

 

In fact, his magic 

Was not his at all,

But the common property 

Of common men:

 

The word,

As pure and elemental 

As fire and sea,

As the breath of God,

 

And which, laid into a certain sequence,

Could fire the mind, which is the only sky.

The First of May

 

Funny how dull fruition is. 

Summer is a drone, a lullaby, 

While spring is glory, overwhelming reason, 

Stirring the blood, sparking the heart’s cold fire.

 

The becoming, I think, is everything;

Being is hardly worth the time

When birth, after all, is the only life,

And death is a dream

Out of which flowers wake,

Blinking in the newborn, mid-May sun

And smiling on the living-dying world.

The Only Thing

 

To live, and simply live,

And maybe at the most

Say something worth hearing

About what it was like to be

In a particular place and body

At a particular time,

Which maybe, if you say it well,

Means something to other people,

In their own times and bodies,

And with their own petty concerns,

Who catch a glimpse of something immortal

Gleaming just out of view,

And always disappearing over the horizon,

Leaving the soul in material night,

With only the memory of the warm sun –

But memory is the same as light,

Because after all, there is only the mind,

Watching a shadow on the wall of a cave,

And finding joy in the dancing shadow

For as long as light and memory last.

 

Eclipse

 

In the superstitious past,

This would have been an omen –

A harbinger of blight,

A warning of leaner times.

 

Today, it’s a party,

An excuse to travel,

To wear funny glasses

Or wave the colander around.

 

We’re hard up for wonders,

But we love an occasion –

And to that degree, at least,

We haven’t changed at all;

 

We’ll take any pretext

To don strange attire,

Concoct a new ritual,

And bask in the chosen day.

The Old Campus

 

In the shadow of ancient buildings,

We lead our little lives –

Petty, provincial, groundlessly proud –

Warm, delicate, flitting creatures,

Flowing between the titans

Of Gothic, indifferent stone.

 

Yet who built the titans?

People as small as we.

Smaller, in fact, as well as fewer,

And with the clumsier tools at hand.

They were not angels, built out of holy fire,

But only flesh, craving and craven,

As prone to doubt and failure

As any of your drinking-pals.

History makes them loom colossal,

But they were the same ungainly things,

On a brief vacation from nothingness,

Made for the dust, making the noble world.

Easter

 

We could all use a little resurrection –

Especially now, with winter hanging on, 

Still biting the air in the early morning,

Chilling the wind, even threatening frost.

 

Gods, men, and daisies – all are prone to die,

And crave rebirth, and bloom in the new sun,

Stretching their infant bodies to the sky

Where summer blue has tremblingly begun.