From: The Lazarus Poems

 

 

XI

 

Lazarus Wept Bitter in His Soul

 

As stars ignited on the horizon,

Lazarus stood by a lucent lagoon,

Pondering the equations of loss,

The ambivalence of his own status,

Patient as a theologian in search

Of angel feathers singed by moonlight,

Wearing his silhouette like a rug.

He trawled for fish luminous as rumour,

Flecked by a litmus of nova light,

Speckled herring the colour of quartz,

Fluorescence of the sea’s mysteries.

Lazarus watched an ancient comet flare,

Returned from other trajectories,

Frosting the dark sky like a white bird.

He audited the world’s deepest promise,

A catalogue of that which is longed for.

Where is my love, my golden-haired wife?

The day sky rose blue as kerosene,

And the entire ocean was inert.

Lazarus wept bitter in his soul.

 

XIII

 

Lazarus Drifted on the Blitzed Negev

 

Lazarus drifted on the blitzed Negev,

Jackals cracking bones in their caves,

The cold blow bright as silica,

The sand’s sibilant music rising,

The wind like emery on his brow.

Where is the memory of my return,

My narrative in the history of time,

The record of my final resting?

His voice keened down the desert washouts,

Echoed on the mesas like a lament.

The Negev returned a pure silence.

 

 

XV

 

Lazarus Wandered a Littered Beach

 

Lazarus wandered a littered beach,

The sea hard-hammered by electrum light,

The day an anvil of tempered steel.

Scuffed the debris of the storm-sky’s wrack,

Looking for patterns or any lost clue,

A Rosetta-like text to translate

His ironic state and null existence,

Witness to the wonders of each living day,

Full of the Twin Towers’ violet fire,

A free-fall of small lives to the asphalt.

The sea boomed at his abraded feet,

And there were portents on the acidic tide.

 

 

XIX

 

Lazarus in the Gaza Strip

 

Puzzled, Lazarus entered a beachside café,

Imbibed a deep draft of History’s offering,

Its chalice of cordite and lethal malice,

The acrid bouquet of a corrupted wine.

From a mosque’s courtyard Kaytusha rockets

Arced strange parabolas across his eyes,

An icy and beguiling vertigo,

The moon lighting the Nile like a flare,

The black Mediterranean brooding,

Spectral Templars in weary formations,

Longing for a glimpse of Jerusalem.

A stony wind rolled in like heresy,

And whole parables were put to the sword,

Their lost cries ghosting down arid wadis.

From the ruins, in their ragged thousands,

Gaunt cats emerged to feed on the dead.

Lazarus shivered in the shadows.

 

 

 

XXIII

 

Lazarus Stumbled on Che Guevara

 

Lazarus stumbled on Che Guevara,

High in Bolivia’s wretched badlands.

Asthmatic murderer, cold Commissar,

Drafter of the squalid lists of death,

Conjurer of a Calypso Gulag.

Che longed for the legend of his own demise.

He would return writ-large on T-shirts,

Pop merchandise of decadent Europe,

Utopian Stalinist, bourgeois icon,

Swaddled in the strangest ironies.

Lazarus, merciful, did not squeeze the trigger.

 

XXV

 

Lazarus Among the Everlastings

 

Lazarus, swaddled in mauve moonlight,

Contemplated the world’s wide beauty.

Strolled through a grove of everlastings,

A shiver of breeze through the flowers,

Pert blooms musk and white as ice.

Drank the spectrum of a rainbow’s water,

Read the rich aesthetics of geology,

The structure of a mountain’s poem,

Venus blue with acetylene fire,

The Milky Way’s haze like exhaled breath

On the frigid void’s black nothingness.

Lazarus weighed the whole wonderful lode,

Stunned at the final veto of Death,

Everlastings wilting in the wind.

Rod Moran

(The Lazarus Poems is a long sequence I have been writing for the last fifteen years or so. It is still in process.)

 

 

A Desolate Wind

A desolate wind

From the desert blows,

A song of lament,

A billow of crows.

 

It scours like water

Down the dry creek-beds,

Abrades a flint moon

And the light it sheds.

 

What does the wind say?

Of what does it sing,

So darkly and sad,

In its wandering?

 

Of the water’s woes,

Of the death of birds,

Of the flowers cursed,

Of the dwindling herds.

 

Of towers aflame,

Of the child distraught,

Of a scholar chained,

Of the butchered thought,

 

Of the suicide mind,

Of the dead high-seas,

Of the fractured heart,

Of the victims’ pleas.

 

Of narco-despair,

Of the strangled cry,

Of the steel-grey fist,

Of a shining lie.

 

O, an arid wind

Of carrion crows

Billows through the world,

And so darkly blows.

Rod Moran