Tractaus by Derek Mahon
‘The world is everything that is the case’
From the fly giving up in the coal-shed
To the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God
Who hides, shame-facedly, His aged face
Whose light retires behind its veil of cloud
The world, though, is also much more -
Everything that is the case imaginatively
Tacitus believed that mariners could hear
The sun sinking into the western sea;
And who would question that titanic roar,
The steam rising wherever the edge may be?
2 comments:
I've been rearranging my shelves & just pulled Mahon down having not read him for a long while, so it's nice to see him here as well. The poem that stopped me was "Antarctica", a villanelle that makes Lawrence Oates' last recorded words into one of the refrains. I'm not really one for poems that eulogize national heroes but this one just bypasses all that.
A little more Mahon for you today. 'Antartica' very fine too. He wrote a lot and his rhymes can clang betimes. Lots of the good true stuff.
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