12 Towards A Definition of the Seasons by Duncan MCGibbon (classic reads txt) 📖

baby has been killed

so he rushed up and down
...picnic parties with
miserable scores of asses, male and female
...till the sun made him brown

a waistcoat and drawers being his dress.
Why should I not do the same?
That bewildered Old Man of Corfu.

that he is settled with his
matronly men servants
his animals, his Medeira, his claret
and his sketch books.

Later, he would write
“… I am now cut adrift, though
I cannot write the name without a pang.
...ginger-beer and claret and prawns..”

His head, heavy
in the afternoon
with a second bottle of wine.
sinks into historic sleep.


12. Scorpion Wall

The pirate can enter here too,
a shuffling by the rusted gate
and a leap for the new ditch
and he is in, glorying in the garden,
clumping up the path
with his stolen crutches.
He will marvel at the overgrown tree
observe the gentle scorpions of the wall
as generous as before.

Inside all is a shattered mess
of second-hand antiques.
While the quiet sun glows
at the British family
captured, by Linnaeus perhaps
the perfect genus, Albion.
colonial, ex-military, moneyed,
eccentric and so strangely left alone
to the delight of the eye.

Pyrrhus will not have it,
adds photographs, diagrams
and measures dimensions to compare
the text of "My Family..."
and concludes the villa is real,
but the music of the house
has not been heard in reality.
and they drive away listening to
Die Engführung on tape.

Meanwhile Phaecian Chiton
and Corinthian radula
strike deathblows,
the maxillas of Emperor wasps
chew into scriptured martyr-ants,
cockroach Crusaders clash
with a Byzantine firefly,
fair Khali Khartonou, the Venetian
is taken for Murat in his mandibles.
While a mercenary
German Count, the spotted toad
rushes a lacewing
to the surprise of Osmanli geckos
on the scorpion wall.

13. A Zacinto . A version from Foscolo

My frame shall never touch the holy shores
where these bare feet , as an infant, lay.
Zakinthos, I saw as in the wind you paused
in Greek seas, while Venus, a virgin made her way
to that leafy place. Her first smile still stores
ripeness in the soil, gives first love its sway
over shyness yet still the land abhors
to sing the poetry of a sailor's tragic stay
and fated exile. For carried on salt-stained oars
came Ulysses, handsome with famous fate,
to embrace his home, Ithaca of stones.
You will not own this exile. Words are my spores,
matronal earth, for destiny does not abate
and leaves a tearless gravestone for my bones.


Exequy For A Sad King
 

1. Repatriering

I never knew you,
neither in times
of popular joy,
nor in sorrow.
The only chance
I would be likely
to meet a king,
outside of history.
“His strength had ebbed away:
death’s token in his field-bright face.”

I glanced at the news
in Paris Soir to see
you had gone to find
the sun and died
alone before the sea.

Then I skimmed
how Paola and Albert
looked under gloss.

We had stopped
at an autoroute, Aire
du repos des Olives
lost outside some city,
Clare having sped
us from Calais.

There was talk of neglect,
The party was understaffed
and the queen trying
to phone from the yacht.

I had expected
the whole event
to be forgotten.
I blundered
into a mother with a child
at her breast.

I expected her
still to be there
when I looked back
to say sorry,
but she had gone.
Just as I blundered
into your lived life...

They brought
the coffin down
at Brussels airport
down the narrow steps,
its crucifix aflame
in the glare of flash bulbs
but you had gone
even from the arc-lights
of the public dream.

2.Begravelsesemusik

Your face like
a sensitive clown
stunned into print
on placards and screens
and the signs scrawled
with “Merci Sire:”
the syntax of
Trauermusik,
on slow horns.
You were
an obsolete symbol
of authority,
or some clever allusion
in a Modernist poem.
“Death’s sword had cut too deep:
the brave, happy warrior silenced.”

And yet
the crowd waited
three hours before
it began to move,
before the coffin
on the gun-carriage
pulled by an armoured car,
the papers called Le blindé
arrived in the grey palace
before the coffin,
like a display
in a shop-window:
More like an arrest
than a welcome.


3. Requiemmassa

The son of luckless man,
who put his vow
he would not have
the Swastika fly
above the Laeken Palace,
above his family,
only to be condemned
by his people.
You were the step-son of
an unwanted consort
and the mourner
of a beloved one.
You were supposed to be
like the brother
with a French haircut.
You were supposed to be rich,
answering to no-one and private.
“Now everywhere people were streaming
towards the cathedral, man, woman and child.”

On your first scout-camp
the pack waited for a prince
and found you were already
waiting with them.

4. Laatste riten.

There was no place
in the world for
fools like you any more.
You were not supposed
to die alone,
before loved ones
reached you.
Your watch carried on
Fabiola’s wrist,
the habit of a nurse
tracing a faint pulse.
The tourists were taken up
in the mute piety of flowers,
summer-clothed,
bewildered mourners,
bare-legged among the people
who could only
gather in an empty place.
and mutter about
of journalists’ denials,
about Lumumba
and your stolen sword
carried beyond your reach.
A man who never fought
honoured as a soldier.
A man with no scholarship
honoured as a man of fame.
The armoured car arrived
for his medals
and decorations first
before the second left
empty, to the airport,
for his body.

5. Uitvaarten

The flowers were
piled so high
under the Brussel’s
sun of ninety three,
it took water cannon
to dowse them.
You died before
the new world
could help you.
You died
before the Hutu
hundreds piled
across the Rusumo
Bridge while as many
floated beneath.
You died before
the human shield
of Russian civilians
in Grozny were
buried under
the rubble of
bombardment.
We judge things
differently now.
The children thrown out,
then shot before
they reached the water
under the bridge
over the Drina in Visěgrad.
There was no place for you,
among those weeping
who did not know you,
so they let the glinting
Roman cavalcade of motor-bikes
roll the first cortege
through the gates.
and the cavalry
dig their hooves
on melting asphalt.


6. Vaarwel

Always the first
and always the last:
it was the first time
a mourning consort
wore white,
the first to have
the Magnificat sung.
At that time
the last Catholic King.
In the Palais Royal,
the crown bier lined
with grey, not black.
Eight men of the Army:
the last Catholic King.
Medical Corps
carried the mahogany
catafalque.
Farewells from
standard bearers
from unknown forces,
the clairon
sounded de laatste post.
The bells of the
Cathedral intoned,
their hum, hung on the air,
the other churches
alert with sound
boomed across the city..
A twenty-one gun salute
scourged the air
and the procession
moved off, away from
an old century
making drama
of the ordinary
for a new time;
even moving on
some kind heartache,
a scruffy schoolchild
beginning his holidays
meeting his mates,
a newly-met couple,
kissing in a bar
unsure, watching
what each other does,
the old man tuning
his radio for the results.


7 Innerlijk leven.

You decided
independence,
from the double shadow
of Africa, yet praised
the honour of
ancestral murderers
and listened
to Lumumba’s tirade
on the Congo
of your fathers’
in bewilderment.
You were out of
Your depths among
the killers of the spirit.
You were not supposed,
to be rich
and feel it was
poverty to you
in the dry silence
you called your faith.
You were not supposed
to think being a ruler
a weakness.
You expected
the pain of others,
to harm you.
You expected
to be saddened
by solitary happiness.
You expected to grieve
the misery of the people.
You said wanted to be saved
from yourself.
You were not supposed
to carry the
baying press
with your abdication
for a day
so that the Abortion Act
was not signed
by you, and became a icon
of illiberal contravention
in the minds of
newspaper readers,
“now life and the body
have come to naught.”

You said you
wanted to know less
to know God more,
which was not
what I expected
from manikin royals
who are supposed
to keep diaries
about polo.

8. Sepiaportretten

The curse of premature rule
ran in your family,
as did death by accident.
Your grandfather
struck his head
climbing
in the Ardennes
and your father,
who shared English exile
with him after German
troops bogged down in the Yser,
became a reluctant King.
Your mother
was called, Princesse des Neiges
just because of a white coat she wore
when she came to be married,
to cannons and bells
the first couple to kiss
in public beforehand:
a shy, sudden, astonishing smile.
She suckled her own children
and died on holiday
at Kussnacht in Rigi
as she turned
to point out a detail
on the map to Leopold
who swerved.
Severed from the car
she lay in a field of blood
with the king raving, “Astrid!”
and was buried in Laeken
to cannon and tolling bells,
a helper lost.
He remarried in captivity
with your family
driven across Germany
Treves, Coblenz, Erfurt, Weimar...
“They waited for night
and crossed the Rhine.”


9. Verrader koning

...Dresden, to Schloss Hirstein on the Elbe,
then Stroble in Austria.
After fighting with his troops,
Leopold had surrendered
Churchill, Reynaud and Spaak
denounced him as a traitor
who stank of welcome, not arrest.
The charge was dropped,
but the people dropped
the king and you stepped
into history with fingers upraised
to swear allegiance
in an ill-fitting uniform.
Now for the passing
of her Lord, a woman
among women,
forever burdened
with fresh sorrow.

10. Huwelijksdag

Cardinal Siri took a
suite to himself.
The future king of Spain
had a row under the eves,
Fabiola brought her family,
exiled after Franco
from the Calle Zurbano
with its plane trees,
to windswept Brussels
and you not knowing what to do
with your long sword
in the secular Hotel de Ville,
turned to your father,
who nodded when you got it right
Four corteges
of royal families, diplomats
and sovereigns
preceded you.
a Mercedes to the civil ceremony
coaches to the church
Green and black curtains
flapped behind charcoal braziers
in the unsheltered cathedral.
“She entered the Minster
with her train of ladies.”
The step children of Argenteuil
and the in-laws of Luxembourg
carried the long train.
Her white silk woven at Rocafort
in Catalonia, decolleté bateau
to her shoulders, white and slim
her body fasted within the Balenciaga
dress that made history of her slenderness.
Thought of in Madrid made in Paris
You kept smelling