Salvage

'Shepherds, peasants, craftsmen, merchants, inn-keepers, priests, prostitutes - all the ingredients needed to found a city' (*)

 

Evidently, they had hopes for you,

Romulus Augustus, consummately destined

To bring two beginnings to one end.

 

You were too young to understand

The peepshow of history, where

What is past and what's impending

 

Flickered towards your future,

Centuries compressed into

Fraught moments when the mob

 

At last had its heyday.

Your end before you could begin

Had long been going on unawares.

 

Did your daunted mind slip

Back to that grubby, ordinary start -

The safe ford, safe hills, kidnapped

 

Women, the short, efficient sword

And mastery of pragmatism -

Or did history's bickering get

 

In the way as it happened around you?

You did not have time enough

To perfect your own expertise

 

In treachery and intrigue

Yet youth and ineptitude were,

Of course, your salvation, your wreck

 

Left for salvage not quite forgotten,

As power took new guises,

Wore a different purple.

 

 

(*) Giuseppe Antonelli,The History of Ancient Rome, from the Origins to the End of the Republic

 

Jumble Sale

 

I am my own fossil,

   My many lives buried

Beneath oceans of history,

   Compacted, compressed.

 

Only inklings, exercises

   In indifference

And the certainty that

   Nothing is certain.

 

Wisdom should be

   A capacity for surprise,

Astonishment, a kind

  Of temporary dying

 

Struggling for breath,

   Resurfacing, restarting ...

A hinted knowledge

   Of possible futures.  

 

The past cranks up

   Its heritage of antiques,

Buried and forgotten,

   Sometimes re-exhumed

  

Crusted with time's neglect.

   Bits of self that

Won't let us shut

   Memory's suitcase.

  

Days turn dormant,

   Recede imperceptibly

Into the past:

   They come and go, like

  

These words where

  I have lived my life,

Turning their backs

  At times, like a lover

 

Spurned, or bursting banks

   Incomprehensibly.

Words so easily become

   Uninhabitable.

  

Poles Apart

'Proceed trustfully, I shew the way'  epigraph from Trade Mark London, The Story of Francis Barker & Son - Compass and Scientific Instrument Makers, Paul Crespel, 2009

 

Our apparently reliable instruments

            Brought us here,

Where we no longer have any sense

            Of where we are going, nor even

Where we are or where we came from.

 

There are infinite, interminable ways

            Of going in the opposite direction

But only one way out, pulled to

            Another absolute extreme.

The compass has dipped

           

To its own Nirvana, is stuck,

Unable to veer or point

To a way we should take -

Finding its own home at last,

It only tells us we are lost.

 

Confused, we have to get to know

            Our own fallibility -

What we think we understand

            Changes, needs adjusting:

Landmarks can be deceptive, readings

           

Untrustworthy. All deviations must be

            Accounted for, all declinations -

We can put no faith in our certainties:

            Things drift, are dragged off track,

Affected by local discrepancies.

 

Here, at one of the countless

            Mid-points of infinity, it

Is like Zeno's stone never reaching ground

            Or prime numbers splitting

 

Eternally into incontrollable fractions.