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The Spike [or Victoria University College Review 1954]

Empirical History

Empirical History

Why should a man think because the heart is vulnerable
that he can beat the drum, make incantation
out of the names of rivers, the green thythm of love,
birds of flamed plumage in a sky of oil?

why should I be the one whose crucible
yields up the potent meaning of resurrection
or mouths the words of the orator that move
rough hands to the weeping faces, sway the will?

in all clew mornings the scuttling spiders' fingers
net up the wet, high hedges, glacial with diamonds;
and in the darkness hands move with their secret praise,
gentle but still demanding whose is the poem now?

o surely where the uncertain, poised hands linger
there is beauty there and a fire and wonder beyond
label; but there is also dread, pain, war, voices, the way
silence swings through that vast and empty house.

again the rose opens an unhealed wound and no sounds
mean, "rose", more than any other; nor is any white thing
that one can speak of as white as the mortal snow
melting in death's cauldron, drowning, flooding the flames.

no, though the heart is vulnerable the wounds
are their own lost voices; only they can sing
what they feel Whoever made us made it so
we have no more than an eye and a flair for names.