Heart Of Darkness

http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20100223121732/oneandother.co.uk/participants/Roger_T

Sometimes I look at a poem years later and am well pleased. At other times, I despair that it has not achieved anything like what I intended although it must have appeared so at the time or I would never have published it. [The original has also been published elsewhere, besides my collection, so it wasn’t a bad poem.]

As I re-enter the poem from a different angle, one I could not access the first time around, for whatever reason, it will often assume new dimensions; such is the case with today’s poem.

Oh, and yes, I have taken the title from Joseph Conrad’s wonderful novel.

HEART OF DARKNESS

Eyes glowing in a premature darkness
like cat’s eyes on a loping highway in a storm,
padding its way with stealth and guile,
brushing giant leaf and fern in Brobdingnag;
concrete jungle spread all around;
wings of steel pitted against natural instinct;
dirt tracks strewn with primeval litter,
secret paths to Earth Mother’s hand written
poetry and prose

Hear the lion roar, rearing and pawing
at the sky, unbowed by heaven’s wary eye;
flashes like daggers at Caesar’s back,
taking the Beast through its paces till it drops;
apes swinging here and there, eager
to mock a weary lion but taking care to steer
well clear; no confrontation
else a feast of claws devour even salvation,
torn pages of Darwin

Ah, but let the Beast rest while it may.
Hunters and hunted will find each other out
soon enough, about to discover
whether any moon creature can match us
eye for eye, tooth for tooth,
and to whom the wind shall read a eulogy
where darkest poetry and prose read
and old gods laughing for our inability
to understand a word


Copyright R. N. Taber 2002; 2010

[Note: This poem has been all but completely rewritten from the original version as it appears in 1st eds. of The Third Eye: poems by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2004; 2nd ed. in preparation.]