1. |
The Burdens
02:42
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The Burdens
BY STEPHEN SEXTON
Before any of it, a goat appeared
in a piebald sweater, beardless
and tethered at the collar
on half a tennis court of land
up a rutted lane above the road.
Doubtless a horse once clip-clopped there
before a trap, a whip, a tweed of farmer
with bushels and crates
of cabbages, parsnips, blue duck eggs
to pay the country doctor.
Not now, and not then,
we drive home between the fields.
She is radioactive, or lately was,
and sleeps on the doses of nitrogen mustard
a country doctor has called for.
Little goat forgive me. I shouldn’t do this.
All you do is munch your poxy plain of grass,
your kingdom for a caper.
If at night you sing your tired chin to sleep,
it’s not a metaphor, it’s a tragedy.
Instead, let’s say a ship arrived one day.
Let’s say its decks were delicate, polished oak.
Let’s say happy impossible winds steered it.
Let’s say the captain, sweeping his spyglass
over the hills, after all this time, found us.
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2. |
The Actualities
03:50
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The Actualities
And what would you say anyway, time-traveller,
should your little craft prove worthy after all,
and your rations be unexhausted against the grain
of decades; the spindrift of rice and confetti,
your grandparents’ wedding there, your great- and great-great
there and there across the quietening century
wavelengths are reundiscovered
and the air is thinned of infamy and bebop, jazz cool and hot;
bulletins reporting from the western front come seldom, faint,
the atmosphere is cured of war, though war happens regardless in Kimberly and Colenso and everywhere regiments parade behind a bruise of brass and cymbal;
until Marconi, only,
clicks light as a blade of grass on the tide?
Time-traveller, you are closer to Mars
than you are to farmer’s sons under caps and breeches:
water bailiffs in the making, millwrights, drapers’ apprentices
dressers of flax, lappers of linen, beetlers in the bleach works;
daughters in brilliant pinafores.
The streets are a ruckus of merchants and jolly constabulary;
the lord Mayor brandishes like a cricket bat his ceremonial mace;
a fishmonger soft sells a jumble of Wexford mackerel.
So far, so familiar.
But hers are eyes Victoria might have sensed behold her from a horse-drawn carriage;
whose sunsets were for years blood-reddened by Krakatoa.
The past is, they say, its own nation:
not knowing what you know is its only precious mineral.
What have you to barter with or trade beyond images
of space-age fashions, the country shrunk by engines
of fearsome speed; the fangled candleswitch of electric light
whose blessings with holy water blossom into scabs of rust
or worse, the fulfilling curse of trench and gas and fission and flu?
Those who dream the most of you, time-traveller,
are the boys and girls who gambol in the rubble of the 20th century
for whom your gaze is absolute; faceless, bewildering and why
you can’t intervene, they understand
time is the chaperone of meaning.
You are of fifty years, a century; the fantasy of labour made graceful
by automata if not by dignity; you are airships and wingsuits
over silver cities of the healthy and hungerless;
you are of happiness: let them not discover otherwise.
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