"Juxtapositions"
I
Black-robed skeleton hangs from basketball hoop
arresting contrast in a suburban neighborhood.
Cold breeze rattling golden tree leaves
on a sunny autumn day. Image
too close in appearance to those I saw
in photos from history, men’s corpses
tree hung for daring to be themselves
in a country that made them slaves.
Are you disturbed already?
does the morning coffee you drink
sit so well in the stomach as you sit
in a traffic jam, hear the spooky songs
radio-played in this fright season.
Witnessing one experience
which built the country we know today.
Shall we fear what they feared?
shall we treat hanging bodies
as a joke or a provocation?
Is this ancestral memory
for those who trace their lives back
beyond the seas in another country
justifiable in modern society?
II
Plastic skull propped above
purple flourishing flowerbush.
Summer has not left us behind
even as leaves turn, nights lengthen,
sunlight squeezed into shorter time.
In this discordant image
I’ m reminded of those gone
first falling to the pandemic.
Remembrance of a painting
in London's National Gallery. Two
powerful men in costumed finery
standing behind a table
laden with symbols of mortality
while, underneath this table oblique skull,
reminder in those plague days
of how swift life and breath could end.
What does this disturbing skull
amid blooming flowers,
say? This “memento mori”, does
it amuse us in its absurdity? Or instead
speak of fall that is coming
more than leaves returning to
ground but the one truth
awaiting all.
III
Season of fake graveyards
planted for humour’s purposes.
Should I laugh at death, or should
I pass by? What is this festival
of the spooky about anyway?
A voice cries in the wilderness;
a whistling north-west wind chills
bones; sun cloud-veiled.
What would you have me
call to mind today?
I walk a path between worlds.
I seek wisdom from those
guardians in shape of crow, deer, hawk,
who on the ground and airborne
observed for millennia season’s change;
whom people of the land revered,
whose knowledge they desired,
until settlers swept them away.
Golden tree leaves speak of those long gone
houses we built cover their land;
they knew where they came from.
Earth, their mother, gave them birth;
when their passage ended,
received them in death.
Nature’s cycle ongoing, wheel
in which death and life intertwined,
a new creation recognized.
© Phil Kemp 2024