MS Collections

VERSES
by
Patrick Joseph Kavanagh

with some corrections in the author’s hand

John Gawsworth
amanuensis

August 1938
London: 33 Great James Street.

We are the children of light, 
Wise, not companioned
By goats
In a condemned graveyard.

Backward blowing
Blizzards of memory
Flatten out
The genealogies.

You distorted the pattern I had composed 
From the certainties of Earth
And left me worse off than any mad-man.

Now is the clock hour
The triumphant stroke
Struck. This is the inexorable.
This rubber-band life
Is stretched to violin sweetness.

So if our hearts be wise
Mind shall stumble on
Essential idolatries
Truth-sculptures.

And the strait gate
Adorned by dark
Infidel and the children
Of remorse,
Will it not be
Wider from the angle of this seeing?

Beggar,
Starveling,
Plate-glass dreams, steel shutters
Maybe.
But all steel rusts
All locks fail - 
This is not Canon Law.

I follow her whose fingers clasp the crust
Of the living bread stealthily behind
Tense to seize a crumb from the spendthrift wind.

Cold sunlight glinting on the rocky fields of cloud,
The high shrill note of Winter's happy piper
Rises and lifts my dreamer far above the crowd.

Towards the stony fields again
I turn my eyes
For there are the huge black men
And she of the sweaty thighs.

Delicate daisy-snow
Like dream-drifts of
Unspoken love.

I shall not touch it with
My sin-soiled hands,
Nor barter for the glow
Of high exotic lands.