READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

Something there is that doesn’t like a waul That wants it tamed and named and syllabled. Pacifiers serve to mute untroubled The air round a child’s most ardent call. Tribulation turns to ululation. A scream must be schemed into a symphony, A high-pitched wail into a eulogy And cries kept to off-stage imitation. Good sentences make good neighbours, it’s said. A howl, a growl are unsound offences. Learn when to pause, and close your words well-bred. No time like the present for such behaviour. Restrain banshee assaults on the senses, Forsooth, good sentences make good neighbours.

Slouching towards Bethlehem the left turn Brought us face-to-face with a Trumpian wall; Right turn worse, customs officials, what gall! Talking to a sphinx is lots to unlearn. The latest online Spiritus Mundi Lead piece argues those with no conviction And those with intensity of passion Meet their Maker regardless, maybe next Monday. Then reception gave out, whether wifi Or recharging, the centre could not hold. Oh what was my password again? sKyPIe. Okay, Bethlehem scratched. Where next to go. Emmaus, where’s that when it’s home? Not told. Or there’s the old road going down to Jericho.   Some readers may object to this reading of ‘The Second Coming’, a veritable fruitcake of famous lines. However I have always had reservations about what Yeats is really on about in this poem, especially his peculiar use of certain typologies in the New Testament. Agreed, the poem describes the foreboding felt in Europe at the end of the war in 1919, and the words are ...

Shall you compare me to a summer’s day Red hot with sunburn forty-degree rash Flaking from heatwave, mine eyes not too flash, Hatband’s intemperate sweat marks, hair grey. Thou art not wrong, thou shalt draw a long face. Climate doth change mine and e’en your features, Summer’s increase wearies all us creatures Making heavy weather towards a cool place. This mild crease in my brow grew there somehow, My melting cap thinking through whys and whats; I scratch my chin predicting El Niño. Even these words, worthy of a choir May get lost forever on microdots Or float out to space, cinders from bushfire.