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For Old Star-Gazer Master Khayyam - a Name Like Shakespeare's For Some Other Giants - Part One
For Old Star-Gazer Master Khayyam - a Name Like Shakespeare's For Some Other Giants - Part One
For old Star-Gazer Master Khayyam – a name like Shakespeare’s for « some » other giants - Part One
I
Why don’t they ever come back?
Even if it’s just to say
We are still there or gone for a while
Or just too damned busy
That’s the reason why we’re absent
And not for what people say
We’re gone with the last breath
Gone for good into the beyond
If that’s so then just let us have a sign
Why more than just a sign
Make Shakespeare direct our hand
Let loose Hamlet anew on the Strand
And if that’s too difficult
Ask of Aristotle
The text of his lost poetics
Cast in a hard disc
Better still command the Son of God
To make a grand appearance
Fanfares heralding the event
In a technicolour firmament
Or make known to us
The lost masterpieces
The great forging inventions
Bombed to ashes in wars
Or for the departed father
To come set his house in order
Brother against brother
For want of a better master
O Where have they all gone
Leaving us in their muddles
Such a kyrielle of contortions
We leave for those behind us
Those of us who piled effort upon effort
For a better day for ourselves
Now going we rued the tightfistedness
And the bitterly whining quarrels
II
We have no need to come back
To see the mess we’ve left behind
We who ourselves had to sort out
Our fathers’ mighty ill-windfalls
Nor to see what each does in quiet
In your sleep in lavs behind walls
What we ourselves did of course
And thought no one ever the wiser
To see how each of you clings to his shell
To make it shine best of all
Only to see how ours turned to loams
Or into a fistful of ashes and bones
All all for the pleasure of another body
Bodies oozing with slime and foetid stench
From all we stuffed them with in contempt
Worse still what the voracious brain we fed
Is it for this carpe diem reason
And for all that they say is vanity
For the futility of non-interference
In whose favour might we intervene
Since all sides pit against all sides
Just to keep the inter-twining yin and yang
In constantly conflicting tug-of-wars
That makes for progress of sorts
That we see no reason to pull either way
For you do it well enough without aid
Though some amongst us wish for revenge
And perhaps tilt the balance now and then
But you are none the wiser in your pain
For you think only of your body’s gain
And those in whose breeding chain
You thought you couldn’t lose in vain
But where’s the justice in this all
Living we too strained to achieve
Dying we saw the futility of it all
Just a game dying from boredom
Better we know now we see you in tether
There’s no justice either way
Somehow the particles come together
And strive to make sense of one another
With the result there is life
There is a building in strife
Mounting to an ultimate prize
The creation of the perfect monster
Once the form is gone the content
Takes no form of its own
The content is the form’s overall product
Born of a lifetime’s construct
Dying thus gives fresh birth
To what is not of this earth
We are free to roam and rollick
Though we see no point to it
Being without form we may merge
Into one whole formless mass
Or simply drop out inane
As you the voyeurs in a train
Here they waft those great Persian savants
A sardonic smile all that’s left of them
They who best knew how the heady wine
Made one forget the burden of the grind
Yet none read his verse for fear of contempt
Those who do make little of the rhyme
Others cried foul for he preached the impossible
Are wine women and song bought for a dime
Turn away from us for your time has come
No need to ask us the reason for your end
You too will know the total of your sum
And face another dilemma round the bend
June 16/18, 1996
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2016 from the collection : longhand notes (1999)
Copyright © T Wignesan | Year Posted 2016
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