If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is ………. and nowhere. Never and always.

II

Ash on an old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house-
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

………………………………….

And he: “I am not eager to rehearse
My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.
These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold fricton of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and sould begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.”
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.

Annabel Carington

Annabel Carington

In his delightful and exciting autobiography, ‘Light on a Dark Horse’, Roy Campbell tells of his own experiences with beggars in Toledo: “In Spain everyone with a job becomes the regular ‘customer’ of two or three beggars. They were generally blind, half-witted, or deformed, but in this way they eked out a very tolerable existence. I have even heard a beggar giving one of his clients ‘the sack’ for having passed him three days running without offering alms, and the impeccably dressed client was pleading, almost with tears in his eyes, to be taken back, and making the excuse that he had lost everything gambling at the Casino, but would rectify matters when his salary came along…. Coming from a land [England] where poverty is regarded as a loathsome and degrading disease to one where it is a sacrament; and from one where deformity is an unmentionable and sinister monstrosity to one where it is considered as a lovable eccentricity, even by the deformed one, this happy companionship was a revelation to me” (pp. 330-31). What artists of other lands have depicted beggars and bobos with as much loving sympathy as Murillo and Velázquez? Mr. Campbell, who is himself a South African, is not quite fair to England. English people, mostly poor themselves owing to heavy taxation, do not regard poverty as a loathsome and degrading disease. They have intense sympathy for it.

Christ in Uniform

Close at my side a girl and boy
Fell firing, in the doorway here,
Collapsing with a strangled cheer
As on the very couch of joy,
And onward through a wall of fire
A thousand others rolled the surge,
And where a dozen men expire
A hundred myrmidons emerge —
As if the Christ, our Solar Sire,
Magnificent in their intent,
Returned the bloody way he went,
Of so much blood, of such desire,
And so much valor proudly spent,
To weld a single heart of fire.

Roy Campbell