7.Feasts of November by Duncan McGibbon (good books for high schoolers .txt) 📖

into a holly bush .
A robin dares the fence –top,
its call more fearful,
territorial.

Nov
embers dying on the first note of a fabled saint, Benignus,
benighted, buried in the books that rise to the pitch of All Saints
in Rome. Agrippa`s Rotonda is bought from Phocas
for Mary of the Saints: Pius the Twelfth`s
sun dancing in winter.

Mary’s stars scud from a kernal of fire tinged with a ruddiness not their own
towards the endless procession, Vega, Polaris, Capella,
high in the night sky. Diwa wicks that flare in the coconut oil,
one bluish, the other yellow,
undying to
us

at the speed of their own extinction.
Raised from the dust,
the lowly ones
raised from misery, the poor
how distant
they are,

the stars pinned on a black ground
of unseen joy.
I cannot be Boileau, or Harsdörfer,
born purifiers of their inheritance. I have no languages; Ezra Pound,
a mixer of new palates was born in a Puritan warehouse,
his to explore. Rootless English Catholicism
has only the dying blooms
on the grafts of converts.

Lord dig out more folds of clay
and
we
will name them ourselves,
from the homo enigmaticus fossil record.
This time our voice saints are heard, in the frosted skies,
Victoria de los Angeles, Emma Albani first cried to-day ; where are they gone,
the Countess Almavivas? When singers die, their voices
replay more plangent, more pleading,
or is it just the static dust ?

In a day more dry than usual, the tiny migrants have flown,
the redstart and the warblers gone South, but for the
lingering swallows in the Sussex barns
and their hazard families.

Theirs is the new,
whispered in the blood;
Magellan`s Estrecho de Todos los Santos,
Ansel Adam`s first shot of Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico,
first bomb attack, hand grenades dropped on Turks
from an Italian Taube monoplane,
the revenge of the passenger dove:
first female breast photographed:
no rival to Canova’s hot stone.
Rachmaninov sets sail for New York
and flaring out for nearly a hundred and fifty years-
the Cape Lookout lighthouse,
rows of light,
welcoming back from the dark,
every few seconds
for nineteen
miles out
to sea.


2.All Souls
i. m. Odysseus Elytis

El Dia de los Muertos
and across Europe
South America and the Islands,
seeds of fire from the necropolises,
and in India, a candle by an open door
that love’s light knows where to enter.
The wind can drive South West
from Iceland, bringing dry conditions,
or you hear of floods.
In England, Church Commissioners
draft Pastoral Schemes, declaring
the Holy Sepulcre redundant
in Warminghurst and
elsewhere too, we hope.

These graves had an untidy look.
where we played as children and thus
unending among the ended.
Out-built from Twickenham town,
now circled by it, beside the old school
where I narrowly dodged civilization.
Sing with John Blow’s buried tongues
in the inaccessible dust
from the month`s darkness
to the season`s, from
the doorstep to
the doorstep:
Bikini dust, ashes, crumbs
under the seals of grief.
The annulled
recovered from
remembered metal,
re-crystalled in the puja
of judging fire that is love enough
to unite strong histories :
annealed.
And here the brick
loosens where cold ivy
pries and the grasses
thin and the lichen spreads.
“...late of this parish...”
This was my thirtieth visit
to Gurney’s upright November
to Thomas` dirty land:
the place of the single thrush
and the odour
of Binyon`s burning leaves.

The antique towns
cannot rebuild it:
the past is the ruin of love,
yet its courage keeps sharper
than crumbled stone.
We are broken to mites.
Like lost coins,
we are worn to silence.
You were a voice.
that was heard here.
I make an effort
to love that peace of yours,
like a Sunday,
to take out
all memories of you
and put them out to view.
3. Tertio Nonas Novembris
SS Martin da Porres ,Winifred

to Frances and Wilfrid Greaney

In Highgate the trees are still. I cannot remember whom
it is I bring along that day.
As we look for George Eliot and keep finding Marx.
It was the late Sixties and the ground was worn thin with the shoes of politics.
Marx was the leaden echo,
ricocheting through the German Autumn
and the hard illusions of the young. Somewhere in Santo Dominga, Lima,
the Saint will have left his pestle for another to mix cures.
He will have left the chesed of his poultices,
his knives, his bandages; that others should look for miracles
and finding, keep his fire, should make their hearts burn
with the heat of a supernova
and pour your gold on the wounds of judgement’s ruin: love`s ruin.
Holiness was the echo
on that hillside in Flint
with Margaret Beaufort`s shrine and the cold clear water rising up.
It was the girl I loved I brought along, the stones of a community around.
We looked for hard facts and smelled
wine`s bouquet from its mossy river bed, its glissando passage
fresh as honey from a primal swarm.
I remember you both and the bond of your love.
That too was metal from the heat of suns
from the purifying fire,
like perjured Sita dancing the flames.

We were an all –youth team then,
parents and a child,

In Highgate the trees are still above a leadened head.
In Holywell the trees are still
above a spring that flows on a clear bed.


4.Pridie Nonas, Novembris
Allegro ma non troppo e serioso . i m. Wilfred Owen
In from the dark,
your speech, chiselled sharp
under the Surrey sky,
a leaden frieze.
The waning light
can frugally present
even the brambles,
our faulty, hispid bodies,
prickly with shame,
yet sweet on the lips,
though not so red.
Sweet as the briar-berries,
we raided from the hedge,
ripe behind their thorns
which warded off your hand’s
lingering finger-store.
You asked how I picked them.
I said the barb implies the fruit.
First find its point,
as the lumbering nerve
quickens to match
and then evade
the theory wound
to be rid of the hurt.
In from the exile dark,
we brought the berries
with edges so clear.
The fruit is in the care.
Our cheeks stained
with blue sweetness,
out of, o, out of
the breaking of fear.


Chapter Two: Ides
5. Bonfire Night

All poisons seethe in the moist,
high-pressured air,
craving mercy.
Samhain haunts the Kalends,
the solstice of the insane.
It is time for fertility fires
and the running of cattle at night.
Their bones alight on the bonfire.
We are up against the warp
and woof of the earth.
Feasts so deep in the phylum,
we perform them like laws of mind.
A dark side and a light side
to the valley of time:
fire, betrayal, tension, bigotry:
this was the Bloedmonath
of the Saxons, of honour and slaughter:
before the tunnel of darkness
and the blind uncertainty of famine.

A time for reverses:
Monteagle turns in Catesby,
Lincoln dismisses McClellan,
Gentle Prince Ludwig deposes
Otto the Mad in Bavaria,
Foreman KOs Moore

It was compulsory to celebrate
King James`s deliverance
in the memory of my grandfather.
The prevailing Puritanical gusts bear
the flaring trophies of hate,
Catherine wheels, Roman candles,
burning Popes, tarred barrels
and the chants that echoed back
to bullied poverty

A penny loaf to feed the Pope
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.

And yet the air is older, the mad squibs
punctuate the dense air
their reports
a hidden chord of words we hear, but cannot say.
a quibus “By what word?“

The Catholic culprits seemed to want capture.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.


November was always for the opening of power.
Even now the polished procession
and deliberate debate are debilitating, mythic,
a “plot“ in ancient Greek.

A time for victories:
Akbar`s Panipat,
King William’s Brixham,
Frederick’s Rossbach
Montgomery`s Alamein

A time for power change.
The Holy Roman Empire
is a crumpled map
in Voltaire`s pocket
Cyprus becomes British,
Poland, a Kingdom.

A time for boundary violence
Colonel la Balme killed
by Little Turtle at Eel River,
Nat Turner sentenced to hang,
Three hundred Santee Sioux
sentenced to hang in Minnesota,
Five Workers representatives
dead, twenty seven wounded
as the Verona drew
into dock from Seattle,
Susan B. Anthony fined for voting.

On the TVs in the living-room
the heats for blue-flaring Miss World.
Those bikini somatypes:
the muscled viscerotonic,
the somatonic fat,
and the skinny cerebrotone.
All summed up between the flares
the solstice of the sensuous.
A cattle run to renew fertility, yet this age
has beaten back the fear of breeding
to trapped Gonadotropinland.
The giantess, mulier gigas
is the phenomenal present:
“her breasts as if ripe with eternal
milk pointed to the sky,
her lithe legs still glazed
with the sea salt of origin,”
the love-body washes up
away from Eden,
with the obese,
the wasted and the mad.

Hans Sachs intones
Cloverland, his country,
whose people know it well
three lazy miles behind Christmas.

It rains, and Cloverland drowns
under Sint-Felixvloed .
The city of Reimerswaal.
and eighteen villages swept away.
below the solitary tower of Kortgene
to become Verdronken Land ,
a salt marsh where mussel beds grow

Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!


6.Octavo Idus, Novembris
Adagio Cantabile i.m. Louis Racine

To meet you I have woken in a John Clare
weatherscape. So, don’t come to my door. You know
I won`t hear you. The self has only one,
unlike the shuttering heart.

After pale sun, white sky and mist, blind, I look out
on Highbury back gardens. Don´t wait in the scruffy bushes.
Out of the limits of my thought, you know I won`t see you.
Habits of mind are more

distant than miles, or years. I know who you are
and what you want to tell me about.

“The sons of the famous struggle against their fathers
Shy animals grow bold in the fog.
Boileau’s comment “since the world
was world it never saw a great poet,
son of a great poet,” was said to keep
tradition unsullied. He knew my father.”

Winds from nowhere gust. His voice fades.
”I lost my son
In