For old Star-Gazer Master Khayyam – a name like Shakespeare’s for « some » other giants - Part One to Four

for Omar Khayyam, the astronomer-mathematician and an occasional poet of a few rubai'yat

For old Star-Gazer Master Khayyam – a name like Shakespeare’s for « some » other giants - Part One to Four

for Omar Khayyam, the astronomer-mathematician and an occasional poet of a few rubai'yat

................I


Why don’t they ever come back?
Even if it’s just to say
We are still there or gone for a while
Or just too damned busy


That’s the reason why we’re absent
And not for what people say
We’re gone with the last breath
Gone for good into the beyond


If that’s so then just let us have a sign
Why more than just a sign
Make Shakespeare direct our hand
Let loose Hamlet anew on the Strand


And if that’s too difficult
Ask of Aristotle
The text of his lost poetics
Cast in a hard disc


Better still command the Son of God
To make a grand appearance
Fanfares heralding the event
In a technicolour firmament


Or make known to us
The lost masterpieces
The great forging inventions
Bombed to ashes in wars


Or for the departed father
To come set his house in order
Brother against brother
For want of a better master


O Where have they all gone
Leaving us in their muddles
Such a kyrielle of contortions
We leave for those behind us


Those of us who piled effort upon effort
For a better day for ourselves
Now going we rued the tightfistedness
And the bitterly whining quarrels


................ II


We have no need to come back
To see the mess we’ve left behind
We who ourselves had to sort out
Our fathers’ mighty ill-windfalls


Nor to see what each does in quiet
In your sleep in lavs behind walls
What we ourselves did of course
And thought no one ever the wiser


To see how each of you clings to his shell
To make it shine best of all
Only to see how ours turned to loams
Or into a fistful of ashes and bones


All all for the pleasure of another body
Bodies oozing with slime and foetid stench
From all we stuffed them with in contempt
Worse still what the voracious brain we fed


Is it for this carpe diem reason
And for all that they say is vanity
For the futility of non-interference
In whose favour might we intervene


Since all sides pit against all sides
Just to keep the inter-twining yin and yang
In constantly conflicting tug-of-wars
That makes for progress of sorts


That we see no reason to pull either way
For you do it well enough without aid
Though some amongst us wish for revenge
And perhaps tilt the balance now and then


But you are none the wiser in your pain
For you think only of your body’s gain
And those in whose breeding chain
You thought you couldn’t lose in vain


But where’s the justice in this all
Living we too strained to achieve
Dying we saw the futility of it all
Just a game dying from boredom


Better we know now we see you in tether
There’s no justice either way
Somehow the particles come together
And strive to make sense of one another


With the result there is life
There is a building in strife
Mounting to an ultimate prize
The creation of the perfect monster


Once the form is gone the content
Takes no form of its own
The content is the form’s overall product
Born of a lifetime’s construct


Dying thus gives fresh birth
To what is not of this earth
We are free to roam and rollick
Though we see no point to it


Being without form we may merge
Into one whole formless mass
Or simply drop out inane
As you the voyeurs in a train


Here they waft those great Persian savants
A sardonic smile all that’s left of them
They who best knew how the heady wine
Made one forget the burden of the grind


Yet none read his verse for fear of contempt
Those who do make little of the rhyme
Others cried foul for he preached the impossible
Are wine women and song bought for a dime


Turn away from us for your time has come
No need to ask us the reason for your end
You too will know the total of your sum
And face another dilemma round the bend


June 16/18, 1996
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2016 from the collection : longhand notes (1999)For old Star-Gazer Master Khayyam - a name like Shakespeare's for some other giants


.................. III



Is there an answer to this gaping question
Will that something which follows on behave
Here at least we know death despises life
What do you call that which you have


Do you die too after what length of time
What do you do while you wait for the end
What space d’you occupy in our timespace
Or does anti-self exist in a parallel dimension


Not that these make worrisome questions
Nice to know we don’t quite disappear
Right out and that we go on despite reasons
Or perhaps for nothing much after all


Here we are caught in swirling whirlwinds
Of petty time-pinching emergencies
We give what we can of our might to those
We care for reserving the best for ourselves


Sooner or later the world would just peter out
First the sun would give up its nuclear fissions
Slowly fizzing down while its body bloats out
Then the earth and planets would fry out


Would you be still around or would we be too
And when the solar system freaks out
What will be the fate of your bodiless forms
Or would you be hiding in some safe black hole


.................. IV



What good would it do to know the final outcome
If you are caught in a terrestrial fateful bind
So do we all the ultimate spacial expanse become
Locked into it all by no-backtracking time


Does what matters to you be of no moment to us
Do we need to be wily to hanker after heaven
We’re either just alone or wholly naked forsaken
Or fused in a mounting blinding swirling circus


Some may call this the ultimate form of Oneness
Some the Godhead that directs all our wills
Some might prefer the wayward terror of ghosts
Some just can’t bother one way or the other


Some who suffer ill the womb of common unity
Decide to come together only to wreak hell
These harden without mercy for what they wreak
They whose work you put down to devilry


So where lies the good of your worry-dispelling verse
Long have we lost the feeling for your example
Yes at first yes repentance we experienced at parting
Sorrow at what we might have wanted to curse


But all that jitterbug’s gone past by now
We know darnwell better now the dance
No use bothering with what anxious selves see
Over what will or will not after be


There is just this enormous monstrous engine
It throbs on seemingly without and within
Who knows why or who deemed it must
It simply rumbles on whether you think it just


Myself when young did dwell so long
Upon your sweet O deep forbidden verses
Draughts in tankards quaffed I with song
Dreams couched in nubile cascading tresses

TAMUM SHUD


June 16/18, 1996
© T. Wignesan – Paris, 2016, revised from: longhand notes (a binding of poems),1999.