Dancing Round the Prickly Pear

After some deliberation, it has been decided that Reflections will become a place for poetry as well as the prose essay. The brief justification is that the author has experimented with poetry for a long time, and sometimes it is simply more meaningful to express truth through the medium of aesthetic art. If the reader is familiar with any of the Romantics, Imagists, and in particular T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, then these works may be of some interest to them. 

Revelation 6:12-17

Wandering, wandering, wandering. 

Who are these faceless men

The ones who clutch forth at my flesh?

The mountains keep us, catacombs, all the more

Safe, at least so the mountains, catacombs tell us. 

Who are these faceless men who do not speak?

Wandering, wandering, wandering

And still no escape from they who cower. 

What is this heap of rock and wood

Which all the faithless flock beneath, unknowing

And unwilling to see beyond what they know?

A broken image there looks out—
The face of one already broken,
No one recognises the already broken man
But he does not blame them.
For you, broken face, have seen
The endless chasms which open now before us
And seeking now to prove a point
We forget to ask you what they are like
Underfoot.

Wandering, wandering, wandering,
Is there no end?
Wandering,
To this tunnel?
A shaft of light annuls the question,
The faceless men don't venture there.
Climbing, climbing, climbing, 
Nothing so arduous as walking away
From all the comforting torments of the rocky heap.
Climbing, blinding, nearly there
Until there, the shaft of light becomes
Blood, for no light exists beneath 
A moon without blessing or proper care. 

The faceless men don't venture here—

Screaming, fleeing, helpless sorrow

Hidden beneath the hope of safety

"Freedom in Death!" rises the cry of some

Vain fool. 

Many rocks here, but none safe to hide beneath,

Only hiding from them is the care of these men.

Cities twist within each other and the sky

Booms and cracks asunder, as though

The very Heaven itself was struck and cracked,

It seemed as though a thousand pieces of Earth

Did fall.

Like a scroll He rolled up the plains and rivers,

Closing the book at last. 

Chapters end. Books end.

The last line is read.

Dancing round the prickly pear

At five o'clock in the morning

Was the only dance they knew,

But the Lord of the Dance

When He asked what they knew

He did not know the way of the prickly pear.

All the faceless looked at one another

They asked "How could he not know?"

But no one knew, for no one knew each other,

So how could anyone know?

They still teach the dance to children now,

All other songs and dances are not right—

They don't give them a proper education, such things,

All proper, don't you know, all just, all good.

But when the children come above the surface

The prickly pear will nourish not one soul,

But will instead make bleed the wounds still freshly

Of those who had to see the world-book closed. 

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang or a whimper

But applause.

"Like a scroll He rolled up the plains and rivers,
Closing the book at last."