But the dead do not hear us, and we are not Orpheus. Why
Was that singular man, crossing the street at that moment,
Run down? And that child, though curable, taken? Why
These slaughtered innocents, and why those survivors?
The good friend, the man on the train, the woman   
Behind the counter, that old fellow who used to sit
Whole evenings on his bar stool, smoke two packets,
Down pint after pint, and never seem worse for wear,
The virgin of Lorraine or Toledo, the Jew from Vienna or Wroclaw,
The schoolboy from Kragujevac, the noble Ethiopian,
The farmer outside Srebrenica, the librarian from Pristina
Or the shadowed chauffeur whose name nobody remembers
Who drove the English princess and her Egyptian lover
To be crushed against a pillar in a concrete Parisian tunnel?

So many we remember but will forget in just a while,
So many no-one remembers, although they have just gone,
So many recently praised, now bypassed and ignored,
So many hardly noticed, even then, and now erased
And far too many in all, ever to remember,
Though some were engraved in stone, entered in the logbook,
Filed in temple archives or the public records office.

And why, in that manner, and at no other time? If no single
Life weighs more or less than another, how is the balance
Tipped, and how is the measuring made? In penuries?
Ages? Numbers? Hairs? Sufferings? Solitudes?
And what screens, ikons, imagos, flew or flashed
In or upon them? What, if they thought, did they think
In the precise act of dying? Or were they too engrossed
In backgrounds, surfaces, contingencies, irrelevant incidentals,
Pain's precise details, the registration of particulars –
Like most of us most of the time – an unwashed cup,
Shoelace left undone, unwatered plant on a windowsill,
Sunlight-painted patch in an angle of a wall –
To pause, reflect a little, consider ends or origins,
As they were taken over, out of sight and mind,
To the shore further far than any of our dreams?

If dying is an art, and the only one each of us
Is expert in by default, who wins the top prizes,
Is awarded Summa Cum Laude by the invisible arbiters,
Judges, examiners, angels, executioners 
Lurking in silence behind the dark side of the mirror?
In their all-seeing eyes, Lords of the Far Side,
Who truly performs best, gets special commendations,
Dispensations, permissions, perquisites, privileges,
Scholarships, fellowships, directorships, the very highest
Distinctions – oscars, knighthoods, ministries?
Shall it be the one who refuses, who does not go gentle,
Or he who whispers 'Now' to his soul to go,
The sudden swift sprinter, long distance runner,
High flying champion – or piggy who stayed at home
To look after Mother or Grandad, dig the allotment,
Clean well and stairway, keep windowsills and doorstep
Spick and polished for sudden arrivals of strangers?

Does the dimpled wide-eyed child with features unbruised
By incurable mismatches ticking timebombs in her blood cells
Do her dying better than the stroke-bound nonagenarian
Bedridden his rest of days, who has received final
Notice to quit? Or the one caught stunned, off balance,
From an active career of tendering, by the backhanded
Assurance of a unique short-term contract, with cancer?
Or the one who could not wait and prepared for the event
By jumping or diving in, as though death were a pool
And not a bottomless pit without rope or ladder?
Or that other who recklessly defied doctors' predictions,
Soothsayers' bargaining and evidences of stargazers
And outran all of time like a sail before wind? And what
Of the ones who, without any warning, got it
By knife-thrust, neck-blow, car-crash, air-crash,
Flood, fire, explosion, dog-bite, wasp-sting, nettle-sting,
Stray bullet from friendly fire, bullet aimed in the back
Or in the back of the neck, throttling pillow or towel,
Wrong diagnosis, lack or absence of medicine,
Error by expert, dereliction by specialist,
Remediable poverty, government-managed drought?

We are not Orpheus and the dead do not hear us, or care,
Even if they could, to tell us, what all of them know, always,
That secret we shall never learn until we cannot break it,
Till we have been sworn in too, eternally, to their silence,
Trustworthy only once, like them, completely dissolved
From sap, charred leaves, peat, clay, charcoal, amber,
Separated and crystallised into water and minerals,
And all our words forsaken – our tongues glued
To their velar vaults, and our lips stuck together
Like immovable boulders, sealing up life's cave mouth.

Wherever we turn lurk the dead, waiting to surround us
With their barriers and blockades: like pillars, like monuments,
Like comfortless sentinels, they spread above, below
To the edges of our gazes; like cliffs towering sheer
From mountains under oceans to Himalayan precipices
Rising all around us, hemming us in among canyons.
There is no other horizon and wherever we stand
On this shore we shall never learn to cross them.

I want to say this simply but simply do not know how.
I should like to speak with conviction but am condemned
To stammering. Ours are more or less decent mouths
Commanded by brains neither dishonest nor infallible,
So how, when it comes to this, can we claim anything other
Than scantest glimmerings, most fleeting premonitions?
We who are informed by such paucity of insights,
We who are not Shamans, Imams, Rabbis, Ministers,
We who have no certainty and possess absolutely
No greater authority bestowed or loaned from on high
And no accreditation or to dispense or receive
Tokens, tickets, passports, passwords, swipecards, 
Special keys, codes, combinations, promissory notes
For plausible rescue, improbable deliverance, sudden
Unexpected salvation, deserved reward or recompense
Into this or that Elysium, Nirvana or Paradiso – how
Can the likes of us claim anywhere anything more
Than a handful of smoke and puff or wisp of dust?

But all I want is impossible. To hear and understand
Whatever the dead may be saying, whatever it is they want
(That is, if they do want something), across this dividing gulf
Between these gull-haunted, rock-dotted, island-strewn,
Wind-hammered, rain-battered, sun-beaten
Archipelagos they have already sailed, endlessly,
And we yet have to negotiate. Indeed, what I want
(That is, everything, and nothing less than miracle)
Is by definition ungrantable by the invisible
Puppet-masters and mistresses who pull the strings
Of the living, and the dead – who may even be
The dead: for, whenever we try to examine them,
Or merely delay or halt them, even just an instant
For questioning – as if through a telescope, or zoom
Lens of a camera – they gaze away, detached,
Seem not to notice us, chatter and go on chattering
Oblivious among themselves, like flocks of nervous birds
About to migrate somewhere else, or like wholly
Human foreigners, fulfilled in their own company
And utterly derisory or regardless of us –
Fluent in their clammy languages of indecipherable
Signs and shadows that are to us wholly insoluble
And may only be traced in such ideograms and glyphs
As flower forms, wind scents and bee murmurs, tickings
And clackings of cicadas against onsets of summer nights,
Or, over hazy hills, among orchards, fields and gardens,
In hazardous, hieratic, dervish movements of butterflies –
Steps, scales, figures I can never quite substantiate
Let alone remember and, least of all, understand
No matter how I strain to catch at them before they
Dissolve in mist or disappear in shadow, migrate and
Separate, evolve into further forms, colours and movements,
Or get blocked for good around unturnable corners. 

And just as they ignore us now, so too will they turn
Away at that precise instant when our destiny
We believe, is to meet them? While, one by one
And as though magnetised, inexorably we are drawn
Painfully and slowly towards our final conditions –
When our ends approach, shall we go on moving
At the same regulated, predetermined speed, like
Cargoes in holds of ships or products on a conveyor belt –
Or, like runners in a marathon approaching the last
Bend, offer one final spurt, prepare to throw heads
Forward and arms high as we cross the finishing line
And, gloriously abandoning every one of the disciplines
That allowed us to arrive there, stretch up exultant
Hands, so they can lift us, cheer us in recognition
Of our ultimate achievement, victory, arrival, as
We mingle souls among theirs, pour ourselves wholly
Into them, as into a crowd of welcoming companions,

Or, like water-drops from a fountain, fall back into the pool –

Only to find at that precise instant time forever stops
And space wraps itself tightly into a parcel that contains
Nothing but itself and shrinks and disappears altogether
From our own hands, and everything we have been vanishes
And consciousness itself of what we have been vanishes
And all we have imagined, believed, dreamed and aspired to,
Even touched and reached, really consisted of nothing?

 

* * *

 

Copyright © Richard Burns, 2004.