Martin Burke was born in Limerick. Burke is a long term resident of Flanders where he is active as poet and playwright (and sometimes actor) and from where he has published sixteen books of his work in the USA, UK, Ireland, and Belgium -the latest work being BLAKE/LONDON/BLAKE published by the Feral Press, New York
SPIRAL
I
Light danced on water and so I called
Glitter and flow ye golden years
Whirl me towards I know not what but for which I am willing
The river answering with a voice I translate as
Love the delicious life of me
Speak splendid thoughts to the redeeming dark brightening us both.
Thus to live that second life implicit in the first
By writing in the margins of a marvellous text
Seeking the authority of that splendid art
II
Even as I lifted it from mud
The weight of that stone was the weight of history
Towards words in the offing
As if to ripple, stir, re-mix, reform us to a new condition
In which Orpheus becomes Ulysses
Moving inland with an upright oar
As if it was a winnowing fan
To winnow the times these are.
III
Words. perhaps the first in history. Yet this promontory
Is on first sight rocky and uncompromising.
Questions were asked; prophetic answers emerged
But not everyone understood. What did it matter?
The beautiful dream rooted where the sun made its home
Yet now, centuries later, tourists come asking
Where are the voices? Who will dance for us?
As inland, as a crossroads, a stranger asks a question
Of a stranger and history is cast back upon itself.
Motifs repeat themselves in unavoidable tableaux’s.
The first words of a new history are spoken.
Water stirs, old beasts wake –so this is Greece
(Thus this is the world) I thought –Orpheus and Oedipus,
My own voice mingling with the stones
Breathing an inheritance more fantastic and true
Than my history had foretold
IV
Whatever is said repeats the essential premise
That beauty exists, persistent beyond our infidelities
As the grain within the granite remains
As the wave maintains its rhythms
To stand before us as a messenger asking
That we examine its purse. Yet what we say
Will be disputed unless new words are given
To a new Antigone where the grain within the granite remains
I sharpen these words on so as to sharpen the world.
V
Time kills but a stone outwits the killer.
Certainties change. Salt dissolves. Yet what
Are we made of if not salt and change?
(Even Dante has to wail before he sang)
Deformity will pass, be forgotten
But now you will ask if this is requiem or rhapsody
Where words interlace like lovers in a field
Who spill gold seed the field is nourished by
That we might be human to ourselves.
VI
A child builds a dam of three stones across a stream –
His first revolt against nature, circumstance, that mortality
He does not know he faces
Which is why I rush to add a fourth when the third gives way
As my means of telling him
I understand a portion he does not
That I will protect him against it
That only in such gestures are we human to ourselves.
The pressure builds but somehow the dam holds.
VII
Nothing is strange. Shipwreck and starlight –
The sea breeds confusion with inherent clarity
What begins in mud ends in music
The new barbarian gives birth to the new city
A hawk hovers like a guidance of stars in daylight
The river sings a lullaby
History has been ransacked but the river has bullion a-plenty
Nothing is strange.
We survive our choices, love endures
What the hawk insists the woman insists
What the woman affirms the stars affirm
The stars alight on the triumph of her cry
Antigone enters history again
Out of confusion a new clarity emerges.
Nothing is strange where strangeness is commonplace:
The stars which show the shipwreck show the sailor his way home.
VIII
Word, water, light, bright shadows
Writing their signatures on stone
Yet to face into the shambles of the world
To say to my kindred
Look forward landsmen –the world will be amazed.
Thus brother, believe me, should I incur the wrath of the sun
I would still continue to sing.
If there be dark let there be light
If there be death let there be light
If Greek gods answer, if they do not, let there be light.
Thus it was and thus it shall be –
Summer casts its thesis against winter
New light issues from old dark
Look –I gather a harvest, the barn grows bright
I dance as a shadow cast by a sundial
The soul father’s breath disturbs the grass I dance on
Sets flame and tide alight
Falls on the page
Makes known what was unknown, becomes fabulous.
The dead speak to the living –shall I pour wine on a grave
Or un-spool a winding sheet like a rope bridge to the opposite shore
From which, sprightly as a sailor, I step inland
Seeking the new traditions?
IX
The life within the life-what else is worth living?
(do not hide in definitions nor cite the half-hour silence of heaven)
As if by being Dante’s child or in a madness Holderlin would approve of
I might write it.
Now as we are (do not say we are not) and not as some other
Now as now not other than now
Now in a spiral’s uncoiling.
The Galway Review 