At The Round Earths Imagind Corners

At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow

Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scatter'd bodies go;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you whose eyes
Shall behold God and never taste death's woe.

A damp June night in Georgia I fall asleep to the smell of rain Or almost.

A kitchen clock pursues its endless iteration of clicking. It seems to me to be
in a rhythm sprung in mournful groups of six.

Id feel the same if I were standing by the Reichenbach Falls, where the smash
of the individual drops blends, I recall, into one powerful roar, telling us we
are mortal.

Five or six hundred days into a curious sojourn in a place of extremes of all
kinds including those of the weather where nothing is quite what it seems,
I remember the strange bleak ritual of arrival in England.

A maze of featureless airport halls with jovial pictures of Beefeaters, and other
tourist icons; and worse still, that flattened-out depressed state of mind
which goes along with the regarding of such marvels Reality! Wherefore art
thou, Reality?

Memories of times when we were aware of the endless, circular journeyings of
life, which at certain seasons of the soul do not seem to add up to anything.
Not to anything at all.

The clock ticks, more quietly it seems, a dog howls, then silence. Silenceas I
try to discern shadows of hope at Earths four vertices.

Hope which the sun like a tide may wash in ,with its golden and ever-
renewing light, a little while later downstream, clear-sightedly, at six?

When the clock will still be clicking, but in a new key; and the bleakness and
depression that precedes new growth will have melded, slightly, within the
great grey stream of things.the great golden-fringed stream of things?
Which the Hoopoe, Redstart, Wagtail, Warbler and Dove will all be part of:
which their bubbly fluttering, innocent of philosophy, will hymn?


Credits: Fra Angelico Angels; John Donne, Sonnet; Turner, Reichenbach Falls