ON A MILLENNIAL BIRTHDAY
wriitten by: jim bellamy
i
Tonight, a swift movement, a skirl,
as if the heart in bogland had sought out
to sink smoothly beneath a flume of mud
or blood-burst, about
whose mind the eye
spits in perseverance, up and out of water
into spumes of some indigo age. Your
face is a strong line of fission, more,
arms and legs are thrown before
and after
an aptitude of scuttering hills. I
do not regret this time, no, my way
is to lift the veil and ride the rails
in such integrity, that time is lost
in intimate revelry. I grow older,
but still these half-independent shores
grow childlike within these fens,
as becomes one who once a boy.
ii
And you are still imperially
my mother, cleaving with you my pain,
the rending process of the mind,
the heart gone stale and cold, more,
the woven threads of time undone -
the act of birth, once sprouted madly,
whose stance is an act of union.
Your heart
must be as my heart,
your mind as my mind. This
is no parasite, it is
the arrogance of life thrust forth
to trangress the wheels that turn within
to
state your timeless worth, or
to weave timelessness forwards
into what has gone before and
into the timeless earth.
iii
I should not stage an epitaph
to those who have wrung the necks of time,
nor shall I state self-evident
the ebbs and throes
of time flown by;
but it is to those who make death die
that I give these lines, such as
the jester juggling or the clown dispersing
the trendless spires of broken dreams.
The truth lies in the innocence, the
kosher cruise in the innocent's bawl.
One hand is turned, the other upraised,
but still all birth's saluted, is
final
in its confronting zeal,
until time's faiths must fly and
meet the jester and clown together
in a circus of sacrosanct subterfuge.
....
JDB 1997