Rod Moran: ‘Lazarus Tried to Comfort Edvard Munch, 1893’, ‘Lazarus Encountered Camus in Oran’ and ‘Lazarus Pondered the Academy’

Lazarus Tried to Comfort Edvard Munch, 1893

Lazarus tried to comfort Edvard Munch
Channeling the world’s deep anxieties,
The Scream like a vivid premonition,
A scarification of Nature and Man,
The blood-blue harbour a vortex,
A palette of dire undertows swirling,
The sunset like a warp in History,
Its burning wavelengths above the fjords,
A lurid backcloth for an insane opera.
Lazarus intuited Death’s return,
Unable to offer any consolation.
Soon, The Scream enveloped all of Europe.

Lazarus Encountered Camus in Oran

Returned from Death’s fathomless desert,
Lazarus wandered the streets of Oran.
The moon’s gaunt image like a skull
Trembling on the blacked-out harbour,
Scarred ghost-ships, a lament of gulls,
Blue-barbed stars coiled on the wadis,
Searing winds like an arid call to prayer.
Encountered a brooding Albert Camus
Slumped in a backstreet estaminet,
Longing for the light of a solar sea,
The consolations of Absurdity,
Vatic clinician of shape-shifting plagues,
Engineers of the human soul at work
Assigning the poets their barracks,
A stark dunescape like a barren coda,
The desert’s tubercular lungs coughing,
A sirocco conjuring its blood-red rain
Across the lethal deltas of History.

Lazarus Pondered the Academy

Lazarus pondered the Academy,
Its rank alleyways and poisoned groves,
The quicksand of its reading lists,
Curated plazas of an annulled culture,
Pure negations of Enlightenment,
A curriculum of bleak Anti-Worlds:
Voids of blinding indoctrination,
Contagions of abstruse theorising,
A Parisian fog of vertiginous doctrine,
The crude injunctions of orthodoxy,
Sandstone malls echoing silence,
The acrid scent of conformity welling,
A multi-gendered professor spieling
A treatise on biology’s myths:
The zygote as mere ideology,
Human life a deconstructed text.
Resigned, Lazarus knew Socrates
Would die here by his own hand.

Rod Moran