A.A. Marcoff
Sonata in Time
(in three movements)
Atomic
in the Year of the Monkey (my year), I was invited to a temple in Tokyo to celebrate:
all Japan in a flower paper temple light pink atomic city the dreaming
and I went all the way to Nagasaki: an atomic bomb:- ‘It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe’: I will not say any more, I have no words, save that at that time I also listened to Debbie Harry of Blondie sing their hit ‘Atomic’: out of pop, disco and punk (the sweet sound of plastic), a voice had emerged, its songs fashioned by a young and charismatic blonde (friend of Andy Warhol), who delivered each parallel line as if it were a bomb painted with lipstick: she pouted, and her lips shaped the words miraculously:
‘Oh, your hair is beautiful . . . tonight . . . make it magnificent. . .’:
now they say the Apocalypse is on the way, and our whole world is turning atomic – rouge with make-up and metaphysics and blood: and if we could use mirrors as gravestones, we might see ourselves (as we are) in the midst of death, the evidence of our slaughter all around us: so for me things are as they are, and I am left waiting for the kingfisher to create the river in a blue dream, waiting for the butterfly to become its wing and colour and flower, waiting for the silence of eternity to turn into the song of a blackbird, singing to the world, a world I love, a world I will never let go, a new world, and an old world, the one world, the world to be and the world to come, and the world that will always be what it has to be:
if only I could wake singing like that blackbird the dawn itself would be within me
The Eyes of Picasso: A Parable of Beauty & Pai
I was born in prismatic light, infused with blue and rose being: all this in polygonal dream: always trying out new things in a circus of the moment:
from harlequin to lovers to a fighter of bulls the naked light the years the masks
a restless soul, cubic, chromatic, prolific, he was someone who looked out for the vulnerable, like those who suffered at Guernica, their lamentations: see that weeping woman – her angular tears: this was the life of his life, and art is continuum and image: this was circumstance and dream: when we look at the paint itself we can see silence expressed as fire, and this is the way of the eye, or colour:
under the stars when the earth was young he gazed at us & his eyes were black holes
it is time for me to go into a world of silence, and for the rainbow to turn black…
Requiem by Mozart
[as performed by Opera North,
Phoenix Dance Theatre, Jazzart
Dance Theatre, and Cape Town
Opera]
and I saw the eagle fly, a benedictus, and I watched the kingfisher sun shoot by like light speeding through the universe, and I was with her, my mother, when she died, in a moment pacific, and I saw all humanity in a vision, growing, living, loving and ageing, searching for God, for light, for meaning, for love, and people prayed, and danced and danced, and sang and sang and sang, and there were tears, in the lacrimosa of the human condition:
people come & go those we loved those we lost those we longed for this world of light & shadow
and everything took place under a kyrie and sanctus of the stars, and she came to me, the singer, draped in moonlight: she said ‘this is love, this is the world’, and it runs through us all, our lives our blood, our souls, our beings, like the hawk of consciousness, like the gulls that soar in the wild sky at dawn, and the geese that fly in spring and autumn, like raw passion, or the nature of things, as swans turn into stars and shine on the wing, and we become what we are, in the flowering of reality through suffering into light, in the glorious offertorium that is existence:
of course it will all end in death we sing late into the evening watching the genius of waves
Note:
The statement “It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe,” is from Kurt Vonnegut, ‘Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade, A Duty-dance with Death’, p 153.
About the Author
A. A. Marcoff is an Anglo-Russian poet who has lived in Africa, Iran, France and Japan. He writes haiku, tanka, tanka-prose and mainstream poetry, and lives near the beautiful River Mole in England.