James Thomas Hazard
The weird thing about this poem is that it actrally comes form music instead of history or current events. In particular, Gustav Mahler's Symphony Number 6, which one conductor called his most terrifying composition. The music turns me to jelly and yet I listen to it again and again. There is a kind of strange beauty in fear. It unites us as fragile human beings in this unpredictable existance of ours.
Gustav Mahler Symphony No. 6 in A Minor "Tragic"I Shadows
We’ll talk as we take each other’s hand
The air has cooled and the wind
Has died
Church bells toll to bless the hours
That seem to fly like birds,
A chorus of caution or welcome
Over the chessboard squares
Of plaster and brick
From a window
The size and scale of
toys,
City of alleys, busted lights
And dusty windows dark in daylight
Watch where we walk
And follow at our feet
Slide along silent and stalking
Hands in a twist of malignant prayer
Hidden in bloody, dirty denim
Tolling a greeting or parting song-
Silhouettes in the smoke are the shadow souls
For those who see to look upon,
A twisting road uphill and a world like a jewel by the sea
But no place to be as it used to be
For the notes that fall at our feet,
The permanent look of regret in the customer’s eye
Hours long as lives in the same narrow shop
You said goodbye to youth in
No worries then of dental plans or student debt
No, love was what you bargained for
Two cozy rooms and a bright yellow kitchen
A cup of tea and a plate of toast
Two little laughing eyes you love to look upon
Hands to take hold of when you walk
All the time in the world to talk
Up that winding, twisting road,
The city like a jewel by the sea at your feet
And all the future heavy with the scent
Of ordinary pleasures and playful pursuits
Lost in the translation of long-distance calls-
You don’t worry a bit about us,
Kiddo
No more driving at night,
Negative tests keep coming back
Oh sure, the gas is too darn high
If it gets any hotter or drier here
We’ll fly away like birds, I guess
If the price of our pills
Doesn’t eat us alive.
I worry ‘bout you and the kids.
If storms get any stronger
We’ll all be living on Jupiter
Watching the great red dot above our head
And dying of preventable cancers
A place to be
Just like the place that used to be
Maybe better.
Was that too much to ask for?
Tell you, last time I went to a class reunion
I saw a picture someone took
Of me a decade ago.
I didn’t know who that was.
That’s the God’s honest truth.
(Those pills could eat me alive)
The first day of summer storms,
Rolling thunder loud as shots,
Raindrops hit the roof like lead.
Weather like this I don’t remember
But neither a time can I recall
When children smeared their clothes with blood
To borrow death beneath a desk,
A misbegotten tumbleweed of nightmares
Following at their feet
Like a dog that was mean before it went rabid.
What epitaph are we writing for ourselves
Beside the word extinction?
Took you once to see a movie
Four I think you were at the time
Old enough to see Godzilla
Or so I thought
But you cried every time you saw the lizard
Though I told you in the lobby
“It’s a rubber suit with a man inside”
But senses can’t be fooled by reason.
Not at that age. No,
That’s the age of fear
When everything is real
As the stars I saw on the road back home,
Thinking about the death of nature,
The birth of monsters,
Cities burning in the vengeance
Of their own atomic fire
Taking the highway out of memory,
Proving, to no one,
How nothing really matters
Past the signs that never stopped us
Going round full circle
Poof!
Then nothing’s real anymore.
II In the pit of the missing link
Heard someone say many years ago,
It’ll end in fire
Though some say ice…
Yes, yes let me see how it starts-
The fashionable pessimism toward all progress,
Starting with Zeus with the whole
Trojan War on his hands,
Edison fondling globes of glass,
City lights and a switch for killers
(and poor dumb beasts)
Tinkers of wheels, pedals and horns
Dreaming of building a B52,
Steamboat Willie whistling merrily,
Whiskers atwitch with the itch for empire
As Smith late at night
In his cold Scottish kitchen
Writes binary codes for cryptic currency
Invisible hands will hold and bestow,
Pinning the German Eagle to Ford’s lapel
While a second sunrise
Behind a rising, radiant curtain
Heralds the dawn of a new age
For the people destined to vanish,
Their legacy left behind on walls,
Pictographs made by the brush of broken atoms
The marvelous, perpetual progress of the people
No one will pry from their cold, dead
Fatalistic fantasies!
Was that the speech
You intended to give?
As bit players on the set
We all know our lines…
And looking free as a leaf in the wind
Is all that matters, right?
Anxious anticipation is what
It comes to
We’ll talk as we take each other’s hand
And walk that deserted stretch of land behind
The cameras, checkpoints, razor topped walls and dark glass towers
Where small slabs of smooth chiseled stone
Lie under uncut
grass and weeds
Stiff as arthritic joints
Just to read their greeting or parting words-
It’s only a routine
Operation, my dear
The pain is like a vise
Crushing my chest
I don’t know what’s worse
This war or the Army
Don’t worry about me
I’ve driven before on an hour’s sleep
I don’t care what they say
Masks are for sheep
Why did half my face
Turn suddenly numb?
Please put it down
I’ll give you the money
Just find a vein…
Oh God that’s good!
No, I don’t know who the hell you are
I never had a son
We’ll play cowboys
With Dad’s new gun
All gone to rest in their shock, worry and distress
Who can pour honey
On wounds that deep?
Better not knowing
Forgetting is hard
But better
Go back to the protohuman motherland
Bring tools you’d use to clean your teeth
And numbers long and deep enough
To measure the slow, meticulous drip
Of decay in the sandpit pile of deserted bones,
Children playing hide ‘n seek
In the oldest desert on earth
A departed memory from the surface of the earth
Delicate, broken pieces in the pit
All gone to rest in their shock, worry and distress
We’ll hold the remains of their hands
In our game of crack the whip
III Theory of everything
All the megastructures of stars
On the intangible skin of time and space,
A drifting dance of dandelion seeds
Blown from nowhere and nowhere bound
Light dimming in its flight
Till all is permanent night
Everything done has been forgotten
And all of it done for nothing, it seems
Waves and particles move to the music
Of birth, death and decay
For your courage a greeting or parting song-
I won’t be stripped of hope and all I’ve ever loved in life
No matter what, I know that fate can’t take away my purpose
And if I lose I’ll go down fighting not because I know I’ll
win
But for the right to face my own mistakes and live with sorrow
There is a greater force that comes our way but I’ll be true
to myself
And say with all my grief and pain that yes, I’m grateful
for my life
I wouldn’t take it back, not a minute, it was mine to endure
and cherish
And if the world forgets my name what does that matter to me
in the end?
Whatever happens now can never be erased from the record of
creation
I am and will always be like all of you who lived and are
living yet
At the center of the earth, the eye of the storm, the seat
of wonder and awe
IV Genesis
One by one the stars flicker out
Like candles on a cake
That was eaten
Long, long ago
No heat, no cold
No movement, no stillness
No sound, no silence
No day, no night
No fullness, no emptiness
A kind of quantum hiccup
Then time restarts
The groundswell of being
And just like that
We totter then run
On that sweet shore
We never saw before