‘The world transfers / Man / Into its own / Resonance’: Five poems about humanity’s ‘zero hour’

Zero Hour

The tempest moves out
Of the last periphery
The hour drops to zero –

All zones are black.
Children huddle in backrooms
Pleading for respite.

In the twilight hour bandits run
All the runways are ripped to sand –
The sanctions do not come.

Over the unquiet earth
The hour shifts once again
One swift degree forward.

Advent

Masterminded by events
The trial of man begins.
We still impose uncertain embargoes
Upon what we cannot control –
As the witness hour reels ahead
We are thrown out
Of our known vortex –
But the crumbling certitudes
Unveil a faith
As the wheel of our common utterance
Hastens to its advent.

Without Lament

A war is watched
With eyes wide open
As killers strut and shoot
For fun.

Every morning
We pretend it doesn’t
Matter to us –
It’s someone else’s burden.

The harsh, lit arrogance
Of the world’s high stage,
The sweet urgency of youth
On the streets

Where children raise flags
In open defiance
But the money men pretend
They do not exist.

But they do.
They do not lament –
They are simply the conscience
Of a world gone dumb

With comfort.
The world will remember –
The brutality of the weak
The selfishness of its cruelty

Propped up with
Other people’s bombs.
Now the payment of dues is due
In the courts of god.

What god, they laugh –
We stand for climate change
We plant trees
And bomb indiscriminately.

We hold the coffers
We hold the leaders
What can your God do?
Surely, we hold his power too.

The war is watched
With eyes opening wider
All nations have a soul
From where history is made.

Transfer

Silence is the golden
Seat of man.
Rivulets of light
The fibres
Of his darkness.
In deep stillness moves
This hurtling universe –
Yet no one falls
Except
Out of Grace.
That sudden light edge
Where everything surrenders –
The world transfers
Man
Into its own
Resonance.

Conspiracy

It is then
The light falling, the day dying
Grass patches caught in the sun
Dream together softly
Among leaf-fulls of evening breeze.

Far away
A young cowherd...

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