In memoriam Gordon Alfred Wright, 1891-1957
I
Who returns to the absence he came from
Who goes further in the knowledge of his going
-For the present absent from this room-
In the black minute of his death a cry
I am going
The Sunday morning hums
Friends wander by Louis Botha Avenue
A brown bird brightly perches on a wire
It is May twenty six nineteen fifty seven
Picnickers take the road to Pretoria
And the great spinning globe grinding to nothing
Glows in the last breath of its creature
Who returns the present he came from
And goes my father in knowledge of his going
To be for ever absent from his room
In the black minute of our death to cry
I am going
II
‘Not to be born is best for a man’
The innumerable dead deny:
Lives that were brutish short and nasty
On the crucifix of creation.
The Orphic harp of being played
And its unendurable sound
Laid upon zero a command:
By existing each thing obeyed.
A music absolute with delight
Moving to sentience what is made
To a short light and longer shade
Is its own reason, state, and care.
Beloved the various objects move
The rocks and proliferate trees
Beetle and beast and fishbowl sea
In simple praise because they are.
That intellectual delight
Withers like lightning in its fire
The halfway god with corrupt ear
Able best to love himself.
In anguish at the piercing string
Not to be borne, not to be born
Is best for a man, a living man
Cries and a dead man denies.
III
Over us all hangs the comic cloud
Some irritated lord somewhere or other
Or bored conscript may really assemble
To dissolve the material of the Bedford Hotel
With more éclat, in less time, than artillery
At Kimberley or Passchendaele:
No consideration to evoke a poem.
IV
Like temples of Athens, or like swans,
The mine-dumps necklacing the Rand
Circle its city
Or, harp-armed, tauten the long strings
Of those parallel galleries above ground
Shining with traffic,
Trembling in sunlight and to money tuned.
Kerk Straat and Jeppe Straat, oh somewhere near
May stand the garage where he parked his car.
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