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

an earthquake when I thought him safe in Cadiz
from Lisbon, Verdronken,”

I tell him I had read about it.
A quake so big even Europe`s resident
agnostics were chattering. Kant could never leave the shake alone.
Richter hit the keys at magnitude nine epicentred on the Atlantic
south west of Cape St Vincent

sixty to one hundred thousand dead

Pigeons, crows and pedestrians
become fugitives in Highbury.

Don`t look in through the windows:
You know I won`t open them.
Mine is the landscape of your past.
You must have felt that creeping guilt

“From my vain father whose stubborn Jansenism I tried to unravel.
If there is a God his grace is universal.
Our lives would be ours to waste and His to heal.
Or as I wrote “Hearts makes their wrongdoing
and run out on the good they want”.

“I could not be rid of his memory
my father that Seigneur God,
stealing my grandson’s life in revenge
for my debunking his fateful deity.”
In the awe of the nightbeam
where the timed-out dead enter from the dust,
he speaks again.
“That Baroque parrot,
the God of counter-reform,
pestered by his attributes.
Endless know all,
bully-boy with all the answers.
The great are feeble
in their other aspects”

Then you seem to linger.
As after the lightest snows little birds dare our garden
sensing instinctual ghosts of caring hands,
unwanted bread, jetty sloes.
Late sunlight, tiny tortoiseshells
mediate unpunctual Buddlieia
before the frost-sleep.

7. Septimo Idus
Canone a la seconda i.m.Hannah Szenes.

“Now the calloused hours have feasted,
is the match I struck still blessed?”

I show you the boy from the past who leads the people to a smoking hole,
where they see a strange stone and the Landvoigt ordering them
to carry it to the church. Where the Emperor Maximilian
sees a good foundation for his war and has it chained:
“Lest it decide to wander,” as if to tell those village fools. “This is learning.”

“Now that death has turned my fingers to wood,
is my flame still blessed in this heart
time`s lead has opened?

I show you the starved,
Women`s Regiment , defending the Winter Palace
the only ones to return fire when the crowd called history
was slipping through. I show you the men deserting,
who steal the women`s coats for disguise, as if to tell
those darlings. “This is war.”

“Now that the breath dries in the mouth
is the heart my courage ended still blessed?”

You show me your flight, the night-time leap,
your heart panting as you land and hide,
the only mission ever sent to fight for the Jews.
You show me the paces you take in your cell.

Yet those you wanted rescued were safe
and thought you crazy and sing your songs,
as if to tell the dead “This is your comfort now.”

Now that the crowds refuse our history,
blessed is your burning match.

I show you my daughter, a sleepy baby.
who has to be induced and will not wake.

I see your eyes, like everything brave, so natural and clear.

I hold my child as she focuses hers. As they drain her lungs and as she cries
as hot as any meteor ripping to the earth.
Her dice-throw into my life
burns as sharp as your charred match and I share with you her human prayer
as if to tell your testing absence,
“Now I thank you for the coat of peace you left.”

8. Sexto Idus
Canone a la Terza i.m. John Milton

Clarus, friend to Paulinus:
his arms and legs lie in the grave,
but his mind dances with the stars.
And a thousand years later,
the Commissars in St Petersberg give power to Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.
Do they dance death’s trepak under the same stars?
Pleiades, those blue-blushed stepping stones to the universe and the Hyades,
raining tears for a lost brother. Twenty years on, FD Roosevelt
announces the Civil Works Administration for four million unemployed.
Those workers sweeping ice-stormed roads, where do they Charlston now?
Once armies fought in Prague. Do they take
the pas menu on the White Mountain?
In Viet Nam, can you dance, dance, dance
to the Red, White and Blue?
Cortes opens Tenochtitlan to pre-tourists.
with the Bodleian, the Bronx Zoo, and Die Ewige Jude in Munich .
"Jewish dress was a warning against racial defilement”
In Belzec on the Shoa earth, arms and legs lie in the trenches.
Vega, Polaris, Capella,
high in the night sky,
leap with the flames, the filaments , the tzitzit,
against halachah black.
Clarus, friend to Paulinus:
his arms and legs lie in the grave,
but his mind dances with the stars.
And I, friend to Milton, his limbs lying in his bier,
leap with his sovereign mind, a Ludlow Coranto, among recusants that nightly dance.


Chapter Three: Martinmas


9. Quinto Idus
Fughetta i.m.Guillaume Apollinaire
A gift of big houses to God,
should omit the finer plumbing,
built on Roman foundations.
The Lateran, bless the place,
is too big for God, yet has hardly
living room enough for its wealthy
ghosts, which is what
you get to be once your
tomb has to justify its space
and weary of tourists,
who want the sound of broken glass,
announcing the shoa
of Europe.
Der achtzehnte Brumaire
"Hegel comments somewhere
that all the great events and people
in the history of the world happen twice.
He omitted to say
the first sighting is tragedy
the second, comic.”
There are no ghosts of poets.
Who could afford their pay?
I remember the rue Apollinaire
by St Germain des Prés,
an easy walk from the
Gilberts’ flat in Paris
in those now unheard-of,
honeyed days
before Nanterre.
Poets make their own myths
out of their going.
I say. I say. I say.
who was that Emperor
I saw you with last century?
The crowds shouting,
“A bas Guillaume,”
from day to night
to his mourners,
as his funeral procession
almost lost its way
to Père Lachaise and
had to wait for Ginsberg
and the end of the Berlin wall.
My notebook was empty and lies
still empty to-day.
The unwritten notebook
in the Hotel Chelsea
that Dylan Thomas left
reminds me of the woman
who invited me to lunch
in the flat next door,
holding an empty bowl,
to ask me what a litre
might look like.


10. Quarto Idus

Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un Eroe
Being child-minded, once, in Wolverhampton, a boy next door
whose hands alone could reach the top of the fence,
shouted a crocodile was eating the shoppers
in the High Street.
The power
of myth
is to inspire fear.
The Rimbaud fable has him brought out of the darkest jungle
with his leg beside him, instead of the truth
of his sister, Isabelle’s care. Luther’s saintly disobedience,
instead of the murder tracts that inspired the Christian
in Hitler to commemorate the birthday of the Protestant
with death
on the Höhe
Strasse
in Leipzig and elsewhere on the Via Regia.
such as Berlin where die ewige Busoni marathoned his Piano Concerto.
They go back a long way, those local chests of lore.
Pope Leo on the road to Attila was transformed into a giant
wielding a fiery sword, instead of the pragmatic
exchange
of gold
for Rome.
Nothing is nearer still
than the heartbeat under the left nipple
that day when a crocodilian slid through the humanless
Kimmeridgian silt to savage my mother and other housewives
of the Midlands sea. Its stone fangs set to tear the strapless cotton gingham
to ribbons and leave me helpless behind a garden fence that smelled
of creosote and had fingers on it.


11.Remembrance Day

i.m. Yannis Ritsos
Compiègne ; the armistice carriage
looked seedy and old when we visited
and smelled of the sweat of desperation.
Mini-skirted poppy girls had reminded us
the dead do not exist except in prayer.
Dostoevsky’s “rancid fingering of self”
in Turgenev’s fine phrase does not
bring them any closer, nor does
Kierkegaard’s God-seen individual.
A day for keeping quiet
to huddle with unknown warriors,
under the weight of one
and half thousand years of treaties,
from Carnutum to Long Binh.
Those who spoke out did not last
Michael Foot’s Donkey Jacket,
Piłsudski’s dissected brain,
Ian Smith’s de facto flag,
Sir John Kerr’s Balmain
thirty pieces of silver
belong in a museum
of political disgrace along
with the ropes that hanged
Nat Turner, Ned Kelly,
the Haymarket martyrs
and Wesley Everett, who?
I learned the art of being invisible.
alone we travel
alone to love, to faith
and death.
…
It doesn’t work.

Can I come with you?

At an early age in Middlesborough,
when I arrived late at school and
was only found at Noon
in the hallway having practiced
non-existence for three hours.
My teacher found me at last
“I never knew you were here”
It wasn’t the first time I admired
her certainty.
Meanwhile the veterans will
still march past the Cenotaph
never without a war to recollect.
Just as the people in Knightlow Hill gather
to give wrothsilver, or be fined, or give
a white bull red in nose and ears,
until we do not know they are there
under the crumbling light
of Tycho Brahe’s star

Will you come with me?
12. St Martin’s Day
Dead winter, past cold light and into the frosts of the street, that winter I was thirsty, for myself, a struck match, hungry to breathe fire. It was the first time I took a train alone to my fourth school more than a month into the term, my Twelfth November. There were bushes over growing between the station wall
and the railway bridge.
Most were winter dead, but the black bryony still had its fruit, a dangerous medicine for a dangerous year with vast spider webs diamond heavy in a strange sunlight. I had evaded the annual migration rites of the eleven plus on grounds of a late summer birth.
Demotion did not happen,
so I was sent to Twickenham, to pass a failure evasion drifted in the wet breeze, like a Nazi dream of Madagascar. Each day two girls would climb into the compartment. Twins of sorts, they wore white canvas coats and were seventeen, Eta and Gamma Virginis. Like two little silver moths with the Y marks,
masked for the frost, autographa gamma.
They took one case
to school and shared it. They peeled a friendship for me in crumpled Bunty mags, TV Comics, stockings their mother didn’t want them wearing “don’t look”. I imagined them in costumes, one was a New World nun who expired under Bishops of boredom, neat with a quick smile and spider hands, the other, a Home Counties novelist slow and messy, with a golfing husband and the look
of a healer who knew all her spells would go wrong, except the one in her eyes. They wrote me down in the double entry of their hearts
and woke a silver why in mine.


Chapter Four Ludi Plebei
13. St Brice’s Day:
i.m. Olga Bergholz

England’s Eden: US fantasy.
“Travelling south on the Route