January, January….
Ice, thick,
as I have never seen
on Cherwell.
Jagged, floating towards Isis.
Low mists of ice-dust
drift on Christ Church meadow
and cool the blood
of long-horn cattle
standing
ankle-deep in mud.
A lame roe deer
beneath the trees
pauses, where
the sudden call of coots
splits the air.
In the gardens of Trinity,
all is order and harmony.
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poem by Brian Taylor
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Requiem For A Princess Murdered By Her Gardener
Blondin walks the tightrope
over Niagara,
forwards, backwards,
blindfolded, on a bicycle,
to distant applause
among crashing waters.
Ten times, twenty, fifty….
One step missed
answers the first step taken
onto the swaying rope.
Then, everything is,
as it has always been;
jagged rocks and thundering waters.
Into the silence
where yesterday's applause
cannot reach.
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poem by Brian Taylor
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Make The Most Of It!
Said the Junior Dean.
What is “It”
that we should make the most of it?
What have we
that we can justly boast of it?
We have inherited our share of wealth;
and karma and good sense
have brought us health.
Time weighs not on our hands
and, as things stand,
we have sufficient
and do not rightly understand
if of Time we think ourselves deficient.
But what if, as in the parable, we have concealed
our talent in the ground,
and, newly dead, the fruit
of our labours is revealed
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poem by Brian Taylor
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Right View
In the Jungle of the World
and the Tangle of the Senses
we build us huts of mud and heartache
and make (and mend) our fragile fences.
‘This is me! That is mine! ’
is the burden of our song.
We cannot see, still less define
that pain and sorrow prove us wrong.
This is not mine, this is not me,
is the beginning of our sanity.
Letting go of what does not concern us
leaves that alone which, meddled with, will burn us.
The Law is mirror-like in its precision
and its simplicity needs no revision;
that Good breeds Good
and Evil has its price;
that Virtue is its own reward.
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poem by Brian Taylor
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No Exit
Journeying from the beginning
(of which there is no beginning) ,
travelling for millions of years
(which cannot be measured in millions or years) ,
I have come,
and go on.
No stopping.
Just the onward movement
into the illimitable.
For ever.
No need to blame the wicked,
their shadows are at their heels.
No need to fear for the good,
haloes of light enclose them in splendour.
No need to talk of escape.
Escape from this prison
is a doorway into the prison yard
and back again.
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poem by Brian Taylor
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Listeners
Where there are listeners
there is no silence.
Either the sounds
of the listeners' minds
rebound
from the boundlessness of space,
or the universe itself pounds
out a multivociferous chatter;
the sound of reaching out,
selecting
rejecting
and pain;
coming together
and falling apart again.
Every plant, every stone, every sun
has its tongue,
its subtle and interminable vibration.
Every whirling planet
and spinning electron
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poem by Brian Taylor
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An Educated Crocodile Is Still A Crocodile
Rabbit
with a habit
lived in a hole
next to Vole.
And his habit was his link with the beginning of it all
and kept him looking different
from his neighbour, Vole.
So they laid a proper treat on,
washed his face and brushed his hair;
and they took him off to Eton
to be educated there.
There, they dressed him in a boater,
smart black jacket, white bow-tie;
and then they took his photo,
just to please his Auntie Vye.
And they fed him on cucumbers,
Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats.
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poem by Brian Taylor
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Mount Edgcumbe
Here the descendants of Bosworth Field
built their Eden from forest, bracken, heath;
bred partridge, pheasant, boar and deer,
then cast their shadow of darkening fear,
stretched out their hands
and filled their woods with death.
Built Tudor house and Tudor fort,
enclosed the land with Tudor thought.
Four hundred years from that to this
carefully constructed wilderness.
No man-traps now to stumble on,
the deer remain, the boars are long since gone.
The Tudor rides are proletarian walks
where we can wander where the next road forks,
through oak and elm and beech and ash,
through hyacinths and primulas,
daffodils and camellias.
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poem by Brian Taylor
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Speech
Speech
reaches out
to whisper and shout,
praise and curse,
across a silent universe;
making of molecular vibration
a means of human communication.
It wasn’t always quite like this;
the groans
and moans,
the hiss
and howls
in the warm pre-Cambrian mud
were eloquent enough avowals
of love and hatred, fear and blood.
Even now,
it isn’t always quite the same;
the grunts and lowing
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poem by Brian Taylor
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I, Me, Mine
In the Beginning
(or perhaps a little later)
there was I.
And then, because I was lonely,
there was ME.
And WE got on like a house on fire!
And, so that we could have something in common,
there was MINE.
And we got on like a house on fire.
(Very MUCH like a house on fire!)
And then YOU came along
and spoilt everything
because YOU wanted YOURS;
and what YOU called YOURS
was actually mine.
And to make matters worse,
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poem by Brian Taylor
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