I.
'Deliver me out of great waters, from the hand of strange children'
Abroad on a river, in a nation flowing to the sea
hundreds swept aside, the storms come.
All their kingdoms once strong now passed to dust,
all their days as light as ash lifted high, like motes
in air,
now hairsbreadth,
whisper-left
gone.
The Ancient of Days clapped His thunderhorns in the cumulous cloud,
dashed his lightning-rod anger against their implacable mallet
wrongs
Their strange-eyed children trod wilderness floors
in bedsitter dreams.
Organ-pipe sounds chilled their bones by night
while their spirits sought comfort in the smoke of weeds and rotten things,
their clothes a city's blackout for the bombfalls
their tatters made in advance of the coming holocaust
their lives an anticipation of the nothingness that had preceded them,
their past, their publishing houses, their rooms full of books,
their waning last moon
to sorrowed world
drowned in TV light instead.
Baked bread by the radiaton of computer monitors,
the rising sun a piece of paper held out each dawn
to a magnifying glass to warm the spark:
'A bruised reed he shall not break, a smouldering wick He will not snuff out -'
Then bring on the fans.
Propellor fans.
Out on a river flowing to the sea we ride tonight
all our moons alight.
II.
'All things aspire to the condition of music.'
Yet 'Home!' they cry, take me home
to that far shore I never saw when I left
when my foot stepped from the foreshore to the ferry
the land I trod as a child so surely mine
now not. Not so. Not home.
This coconut shell is given me to call my name into and shout aloud my woe.
Yet 'Home!' they cry, 'home is mine' their dreams assert.
And even in their sleep they're home.
"This new empty land now robs us", Lionel said.
It feeds the day our vital power, and by night denies us sleep and warmth.
We chill, here, in the new land, we slowly grow more still.
And all because our home outcast us, cast us
out onto the sea onto the shore.
Like so much seaweed. wet on rock we're stuck here.
I could walk around this knot of rocks
but find another bay is rimmed with more
and I have to stay, on the rim of sand and sea and shore
because here the sky talks at night
of stars and far far kingdoms lost
and places of delight in dreams
where people dance and dance
and spinners spin and spin
and music plays all down the scales of notes to fill the chords of time
with music's charms.
Heavenly sounds of ice and bells, of piano, harp and birdsong.
Hoopoe.
Wren.
Dove.
Bird.
Generic flight.
Wings.
Freedom,
Sky.
Dawn.
Light.
Art.
Seven colours woven into sun.
Movement: slow.
And still the dance goes on.
All things aspire to the condition of music.
Fred Williams sits down to paint.
A million scattered violin notes compressed in heated sand,
the components of glass lie ready to be made fire.
