In the Distance
by
David Cooke
Published by Night Publishing, Smashwords edition
Copyright 2011, David Cooke
ISBN 978-1-4581-7067-5
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Generatio praeterit, et generatio advenit;
terra autem in aeternum stat.
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh;
but the earth abideth forever.
Ecclesiastes
Is gan sinn tagaithe céim níos cóngaraí do Shliabh Shíón,
nó Cathair Dé Bhí, a Iarúsailim neamhaí.
And we’ve come not one step closer to Mount Zion,
or the City of God, his heavenly Jerusalem.
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill
I BRUEGEL’S DANCERS
BRUEGEL
There
are times your dancers annihilate
the humanist in me, as in that
northern
Cockaigne
you viewed with a realist's eye
their heartiness tramps to raucous
tuning.
The women are untouchable, blatant.
The yielding
trestles are piled with plates.
And
such lost revels what were they to you?
Did you celebrate,
despise, or pity?
For there is shown mere lumbering daftness
as
feet clump time on the floor. No heroes
of sentiment or ideal,
they dance out
steps beyond all sins or goodness.
Yet
here I see on one bleak canvas how,
primitive and docile, your six
blind men
appall. Against a grizzled wash of sky,
a
sparse landscape of church and trees,
they make their trek of
faith: a procession
of pain from one dark ledge to the next.
Theirs
is a suffering beyond reach
of plausible gods. Their
desolate sphere
a bald despondent acre, here laid bare
to
affront our safest minds. Blind sticks jerk
as they stumble
on the bank of a stream;
while we tread the limits of what words
mean.
THE EARLY ARCHAEOLOGISTS
Their
patience an absolute they had fostered
on quaint erudition, they
came to dig
the unsaleable tracts at the limits
of their own
late empires: their vision too big
unless at last dust unleashed
its secrets.
Polymaths and adventurers, whose faith
resided in biblical quotes and place names,
they
tramped like prophets,
hoping their path would lead them to fame
once out of the wilderness of hunches.
Taking years themselves, they worked
through levels of time, disclosing
the
chart of settlement heaped on settlement.
As methodology loomed to
obsession
they sifted unglamorous fragments.
Dazed by the surge of dynasties,
a
vast chronology swamps me, dims perspectives
whose light might
fathom sand-locked eras;
leaves me pronouncing names on a
list,
turning over the dross of eroded lives.
HILL-FORT
Evening,
and small fields
are reapportioned in shadow,
the hills smudged
dully
against a residue of sky.
The
honing call of a curlew,
distant, is finally
no more than the
sky's soft
pulse. Night draws in,
and
the mind is a function
of its yielding light;
it makes out
smoke
from a further camp,
the
sense of it borne
upon a stirring of breeze.
I imagine dogs
and people, their utensils
ranged
around fire;
the land burdened
with lumber of
settlement;
blood-heat of habitation.
DOWN
On long afternoons at Johnsforth
I laid myself down and listened.
My ear to the ground, I sensed far off