Love in Destruction City

I found these items on an old USB stick in my drawer whilst looking for something else. Looks like I'd planned to publish them as a book entitled "Love in Destruction City"  in about 2015, then forgot all about them! Go figure!

Anyway,  it's never too late so I'll be  publishing Love in Destruction City soon. In the meantime, here's a sample or two

A Song for Camelot
Exerpt from "Merlinus Ambrosius" one of two plays that Shakespeare should have written had he lived long enough, the other being "Boadicea."

by Yours Truly

Awake!

For morning draws the sword of sleep

From the cold unyielding grip of

Dreaming stone.

King and mage now stand without the gates;

The pound of staff and stave

‘Pon ancient oak resounds.

So raise the raven and the nightingale

To madrigal and round,

Where, not knowing the other’s co-existence,

In silence faked their sleep alone.

Awake!

The sound of song reverberates,

Let slip once more from silent tongues,

Like the sun returns its touch to shadowed strands,

Like the folded hands of smitten heroes stirs and

Strokes to sleep tired dogs of war,

Then deftly turns the virgin page.

Spruce fingers now afire unspring

The lock of lost conviction and palliate

The hex of might-have-been desires,

While the sweep of the quickened brush atones

For the blank canvas of the slumbering sage.

Awake!

You have spun epics for heroes in your time,

Your tapestries adorned the towers of kings

With odysseys of impudent design.

You strummed the lyre, raised the totem that inspired

Mariners to sail dream-driven

For horizons of some dire Aegean quest.

And, yes, you braved Medusa’s scowl,

The storm’s howl, where the glowering ocean

Towered broad-shouldered over the listing deck.

You wrote your songs in runes,

And they were sung in taverns,

Carried in the raven’s beak

To stay the slap of Odin’s petulant hand.

You stroked that hand as it steered

The floundering longship to safe havens,

Breaching new shores behind the mind’s eye.

You brought cargoes of dream, sagas of revelation

To unmade harbours on Asgard’s brooding shore

And buried your hoard for those as yet unborn.

And more! In your time you have breathed

Validation on inspiration’s guttering flame,

Taken sweet morning to the diffident Muse

And coaxed her to waken.

Your own quest would some poet’s stave befit,

Some song like this, for you have forayed

The long shores of time’s tempestuous shifts,

Flanked by the storm’s waves on every hand.

As you searched for the islands that men of wit

Unwitting of themselves have made,

How many futile songs were never heard,

How much treasure never graced the oft-turned page

Or wisdom uttered out of earshot escaped

The corner of the up-turned eye?

Like a Valkyrie you have shaken the poet

And frog-marched him to pathways of his fame,

Yet how much unread and un-adored has come to rest

Upon the forlorn headstones of forgotten graves?

The weeping Shades guard their treasures well,

These gifts bequeathed by Midas to the widowed Muse,

Who despairs of some arcane magic scant begun

And counting his coin in exile, turns blind to the sun.

With anguished cries in tragic ways

We fell each one upon the bard’s still singing blade,

Yet here stands Camelot inured to folly and despair,

Glimmering in the twilight, shimmering like

The Sultan’s towers in the desert air.

Now, deep within her dawn-lit bowers,

The pen dragon stirs, shakes off the scales of sleep;

The warrior-poet unsheathes his quill

To bring the rescue of maidens,

The salvation of cities and of citadels

To the world’s as yet unwritten page.

What hath the power to blast that hopeful breach

Into the stalwart ramparts of despair

If not th’explosive alchemy of ideas?

Once more then, into that hopeful breach my friends, once more!

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