"Where are the eagles and the trumpets?"
TS Eliot: Poems 1920 - "A Cooking Egg"
........................
A sky the colour of my long-gone cat,
the smoky patches and the white combined -
and winds that rock the tree-tops yet can blast
an over-shoulder anger, doubled back.
The little birds fly their long flocks over
these otherwise-deserted dusk-ward grounds.
Oh, then, of course, two dogs decide to spar:
so agonized their histrionic yelps
indicative more misery than rage,
as if exchanging brags about their state
of pure despondency and long neglect
I tried to ring two agencies of state.
The trumpets. Oh, that's where the trumpets are,
in muzak just behind the fobbing off,
insulting Bach and Handel everyday.
"We're (not) sorry our few lines are busy.
We've given up answering them at all.
Feet up, we're sharing all our New Year woes,
as office time drags on to packing up."
For soon those fivers* will emerge and blink
and grimace-shudder in the windy dark
of grey car-parks, demisting, fill lit roads
to fuming stillness in the bass-boom gloom.
.................
*Fivers - Nine to Fivers
YOU ARE READING
Greenclad.
PoetryIvy-jacketed, December oaks on road-borders shock their stark gestures at us now, through sun and sleet, that January will yawn at and February, propping eyelids, will desperately ignore, longing for blossom; and making do with the least of anything...
