A Teacher Contemplates a Chinese Vase
A fascination with porcelain –
To reflect upon its smooth fragility –
Engenders shame
At one’s own selfishness.
To gaze upon perfection in the form
Of an unpatterned Chinese vase
Of dull sea green and glaze
Is to forget all cruel and childish taunts,
Forget the place of Duty in one’s life.
Between nothing and everything;
Precarious in balance, lost
In the self-loss of an intent gaze;
Between one’s self
And every other being;
Where light from the object follows a line to the eye
And makes visible beauty, itself unseen;
Between the glaze on the vase that glints
Like tears on the iris of an eye
And the tear-bright iris of the seeing eye –
All and nothing;
An emptiness that offers a hint
That is quite perfectly still
(Reflected in the porcelain, still peace)
As when all tumults cease,
And nothing urges the will,
“Act!”
The fragility of porcelain
Mirrors the fragility of its admirers,
And it is selfishness to see, and laugh
At our own beauty – fragility’s beauty –
Between all and nothing,
For a moment self-forgetting and
Forgetting of Duty.
At Shoreham Footbridge, All Souls Day
Before the fog rolls in from the sea,
On the estuary, gulls and crows caw,
Terns skitter, starlings murmurate,
Sparrows chatter and flit,
Ragged cormorants sit on channel posts,
A heron flaps high in the sky, slowly intent –
They do what birds do, but on this foggy afternoon
As the light is leached from the air
Only the swan seems serene,
Only she stands proxy for the soul.
She will keep gliding unperturbed
To the limit of visibility
Then disappear
And it’s as if she’d never been there
While the fog is, still, everywhere.
But in this grey absence new memories emerge.
There is the energetic crack
Of wings smacking and water splashing
As the embodied soul takes flight
And rises into the sky with elongated elegance and power
Until it is lost over the distant wooded hill.
Or you recall how, on land, the swan waddles,
With ridiculous inelegance
That puts in question
The serene glide, the perfect flight.
Trapped by gravity, supporting all its weight
On black squat legs and flat webbed feet
She is as ponderous as any living man.
And you realize that inelegance
Speaks more of living than the waterborne
Gliding swan, or the swan in full flight.
Eulogies make men, remembered, perfect,
But they aren’t, nor ever were.
If they waddled, or were ponderous,
Earthbound, ridiculous, still
We loved them. And though they are gone
We learn from the swan
That the soul is at its most serene
In the greyest and emptiest of places
And its flight and glide, even its waddle,
Leave their traces
In the water, the air, our hearts.
Everything will be okay
In memory of Kyal Sim, shot dead aged 19 while protesting against the military takeover in Myanmar in March 2021
Carefree and careless, she danced on TikTok
And all her friends loved her.
She had the moves, the music, the laughter
And the phone-camera loved her.
Where all was shallow and ephemeral
She shone,
Young and filling the present
With her gift for laughter and fun.
Becoming an adult, she declared
I have assumed my citizen’s responsibility.
Of course she laughs for the camera
And kisses her inked finger – a voter.
Now all the citizen boys and girls were like her,
Democrats rising above the trivial
With all the energy and ideals of youth
And fathers praising their bravery.
Reckless and caring, she stood on the barricade
Shouting loud slogans:
“Blood will not be shed”; “We will not run,”
A heroine believing her own teeshirt:
“Everything will be okay.”
Aflame with the shared exhilaration
She must have blazed like the sun
A sitting target for the soldier’s gun.
My daughter what have you done?
I cannot control my lamentation
Nor your mother, who is beyond comfort.
We wanted so many more years to love you,
Laughing, dancing, just being you.
Why did I praise your bravery, to make you brave?
I hear your ghost whisper: Better to be in the grave
Than among the living and not alive.
Strong set, leant forward, hand on thigh,
Ready to resist, not expecting to die –
May all those who wear teeshirts and jeans
And have ideals and care about freedom
And the fate of the planet, and are still in their teens
See you, and in their millions cry, “Everything will be okay
Only if we get our act together
Not tomorrow – Today! Today!”
Flights, Issue Fourteen, November 2024
Flight of the dragonfly 