deconstructing mark
Contact me
|
|
| C. Day LewisWalking Away It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day - A sunny day with the leaves just turning, The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play Your first game of football, and then, like a satellite Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away. Behind a scatter of boys I can see You walking away from me towards the school With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free Into a wilderness, the gait of one Who finds no path where the path should be. That hesitant figure, eddying away, Like a winged seed loosed from its parent stem, Has something I never quite grasp to convey About Nature's give and take - the small, scorching Ordeals that fire one's irresolute clay. I have had worse partings, but none that so Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly Saying what God alone could perfectly show - How selfhood begins with a walking away, And love is proved in a letting go. from Noah and the Waters Since you have come thus far, Your visible past a steamer's wake continually fading Among the receding hours tumbled, and yet you carry Souvenirs of dead ports, a freight of passion and fear, Remembrance of loves and landfalls and much deep-seated predicament, Active upon the heart: - consider by what star Your reckoning is, and whether conscious a course you steer Or whether you rudderless yaw, self-mutinied, all at sea. You have come far To the brink of this tableland where the next step treads air, Your thoughts like antennae feeling doubtfully towards the future, Your will swerving all ways to evade that unstable void; High stakes, hard falls, comfortless contacts lie before, But to sidestep these is to die upon a waterless plateau; You must uncase and fly, for ahead is your thorough-fare. Consider Noah's fate, Chosen to choose between old claims irreconcilable, Alive on this island, old friends at his elbow, the floods at his feet. Whether the final sleep, fingers curled about The hollow comfort of a day worn smooth as holy relics; Or trusting to walk the waters, to see when they abate A future solid for sons and for him the annealing rainbow. It is your fate Also to choose. One the one hand all that habit endears: The lawn is where bishops have walked; the walled garden is private Though your bindweed lust overruns it; the roses are sweet dying; Soil so familiar to your roots you cannot feel it effete. On the other hand what dearth engenders and what death Makes flourish: the need and dignity of bearing fruit, the fight For resurrection, the exquisite grafting on stranger stock. Stand with us here and now, Consider the force of these waters, the mobile face of the flood, Trusting and terrible as a giant who turns from sleep. Think how You called them symbols of purity and yet you daily defiled them: They failed you never; for that they were always the disregarded. Ubiquitous to your need they made the barley grow Or bore you to new homes; they kept you hale and handsome. Of all flesh they were the sign and substance. All things flow. Stand with us now Looking back on a time you have spent, a land that you know. Ask what formed the dew and dressed the evening in awe; What hands made buoyant your shipsm what shaped the impatient prow, Turned sea-shells and dynamos and wheels on river and railroad: Truth's bed and earth's refreshment - one everywhere element In the tissue of man, the tears of his anger, the sweat of his brow. The look with Noah's eyes On the waters that wait his choice. Not only are they insurgent Over the banks and shallows of their birthplace, but they rise Also in Noah's heart: their rippling figures erase The ill-favoured facade of his present, the weird ancestral folly, The maze of mirrors, the corrupting admirers, the silted lies. Now must he lay his naked virtue upon their knees. Then turn your eyes Upon that unbounded prospect and your dwindling island of ease, Measuring your virtue against its challenger, measuring well Your leap across the gulf, as the swallow-flock that flies In autumn gathers its strength on some far-sighted headland. Learn the migrant's trust, the intuition of longer Sunlight: be certain as they you have only winter to lose, And believe that beyond this flood a kinder country lies. | |||||||||
