Bee-Purple

Imagine von Frisch emerging from darkroom to daylight,
a new vision printed on the inside of his eyes:
each white in the flower-bed blushing to blue-green and back,
each red in the garden flicking off, flicking on,
the whole world bee-purple and human at once.

Imagine attempts over dinner or breakfast to explain,
without recourse to ommatidium, wavelength or spectrum,
how the bee sees the Saftmale hid from our eyes
and navigates back to the hive to dance
through the world behind the one we take for true.

A Rough Guide To Monday Morning

Chain your sleep to the foot of the bed,
open the morning like your birthday post,
eat breakfast like the first meal to follow the grave,
clean the previous day from your neck and face,
undo your flat from its tight dress of gloom,
splinter your wife from her sleep with a kiss,
pack lunch as if someone moving abroad,
laugh with the time-check, calling its bluff,
then step outside and on to the road
as if on to waters deepened by dusk,
proving your balance on the shock of the flow,
refusing to falter as you hoof it across.

The Image of Gold and the Fiery Furnace

The demand to serve / the demand to be faithful
to keep our heads in a hostile state,

to keep our names in a country
that stamps us like another bail of cotton.

The need to keep the language of that state
smart and comfortable like the coats

we wear around the town or court
and yet to wear the torn, patched

language of our childhood
clean and bright beneath it all.

The command to obey the command
not to obey the codes we've followed

our whole life through
to kneel to something we recognise only

as a risible blasphemy fit for the cowp.
The need to speakto speak up and out

to speak a mind that's set
firmer than the bricks and mortar of the palace

louder than the sound
of the horn, flute, zither, lyre and harp,

to speak it with a heat that sears
like the furnace at whose mouth we stand defiant

but speak without the singe of disrespect.
To speak as if our lives depended on it.