As if the Ages, Speaking by Charles Bryant

As if the Ages, Speaking

A New Poem: Written & Read by Charles Bryant

Gargantuan pillars pointing at the sky
replete with carven hieroglyphs and scenes
of ritual splendour. Without a roof
to shield them from the sun, whose beating rays
were what they most adored when lost in darkness.
Ruined sand-strewn temples beneath a lowering cliff.
The rocky amphitheatre answers back all sound,
redoubles every sigh of wind. As if the ages, speaking,
commented on mutability in low-pitched voices.
Nothingness at heart of matter. Emptiness
of brain and thought.

Long gazing captivates the mind and senses.
Long limbs enclose and trap a restless body.
In seeing through, not with, the eye
blue skies are not blue; nor black the heavens.
Into what voidity the seagull soars
away from these restricted, leaden shores
across the barrier of so many years!

Turbaned cloth about the hair and ears;
closing centuries; tears and fears;
and all the long abandonment of dread
and of the resurrected dead, still alive in memory
and dream. Eyes more beautiful than diamonds
and more rare, whose clarity makes dim the air
of lustrous morning. Skin whose texture and whose scent
enflames the anchoritic saint: a fire of yearning.
Body whose perfection is apparent
through all the dim patina, fade and crack
of time's particular dissolution -
and rides above it, proudly cleaves the waters of the ages
in miraculous reaffirmation; through the stately corridors,
beneath the golden roof of remembrance's guarded palace
of desire, stalks ever onward down the precious vistas
into unfaded light, unfaded inner light. Impossible naming;
unregarded warning.

* * * * * * * *

In bending to adore that form, to kiss those lips,
we become a burning coal (O bright Isaiah!) and are consumed
against the heated furnace, in the fire of desire and despair.
Like smoke, we fade in air and disappear.

Two thousand years before the birth of Christ
(an altogether mythical event); two thousand years thereafter,
the same grim vanity, the hollow laughter
of the bottled Genie's ravenous hunger
floating on ocean or cast upon the sand
seeded and succeeding cruel slaughter of hope, of laughter,
endless succession of futile days and nights;
awaiting the magic word's release
through all the ageless now and dim hereafter.

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This one is a tough nut to crack! Reading this poem I yearn to have the voice control (and wind!) of a younger man. Some of the longer periods demand a robust pair of lungs - oh for a modern Michael Macliammoir! The starting-point for the meditation was a beautiful volume of text and black-and-white illustrations issued by Thames & Hudson in 1955 of which I possess the Second Impression of 1963, 'The Glory of Egypt'. The photographs are by Michel Audrain and the text and notes by the Frenchman who called himself 'Samivel' as in The Pickwick Papers, beautifully and luminously translated by J.E. Manchip White.