Poem
(1966)

As the darkness grew in the room

A wind stole in from the hot plains, stirring
The idly-hanging curtains, weary

With the scent of night and a thousand flowers,

The lidless eyes of summer.

And with the darkness that lapped at the window-sill
Came a wash of sound from the night beyond, where
For an inestimable distance under the stars

The wind traversed the plains, strewn with the wrecks
Of scattered cities, pursuing its path as of old
To the gates of Dawn.

But in the air, like a miasma, hung

The lamps and revelry of the sea-lit towns.

Beyond whose pale the runner screwed his toes

In the white sand and the marram, after a long descent

From the snow-sheeted uplands, the desolate frozen pastures-

Ice in the river-beds cracking under his feet, and his leaping shadow

Monstrous upon the hills which rushed past in the darkness; on either hand
Glimpsing the glades of Night that poured out their peoples

To stalk at his back: a sad tide of shades,

Issuing endlessly from inexhaustible fastnesses.

Dispersed at once, by the sea-rinsed air, the Atlantic rollers,

Where that black promontory splintered a bay of pewter

And the heady gust of the Northern wind seized by the throat,
Shook with surprise, spattered their salt and fury.

Like the drifting leaves that rise and fall on a lake

In unvisited woodland; an ambling land

Of sinister shires and shaded paths, the forests deep.
And the whisper of water far away

Prickling at the root of apprehension.

Fear that grows in the mind, inhabits a private,

Shuttered place - occasionally stirring the listless arras

As the rose-walk winding when the tumble-weed in quest

Wanders along the way and insinuates itself, capering and curveting,

A caparisoned dew-pond sprite pattering,

Into the leathery shrubbery, under the glassy noon-day heat.

When there is no more time for laughter, since the wings

That flit across the sun, that are horny with bent thumbs

And rustle their scales, their fingers of skin,

In your cracked, crabbed face and crows-foot eyes,

Holding no wild surmise (he'll jingle his bells no more:

Was it your tongue cauterised wounds of an ancient war?) - 

These come upon the side, the creeping tide, float full upon the swell

Which laps at your window-sill. And a beleaguered fancy

Cannot discern the plains that lie beyond: peering through shapes

That throng the upper air, that swarm in the darkness flowing over the sill,
Cannot conceive the reality of the stars that grope their way
Through the may-pole heavens; the prescience of the wind
That has almost already searched out the gates of Dawn.

P. JORDAN, M.VI Arts