THE SLATE POEMS by David Rowbotham
THE SLATE
Fling the slate under the schoolroom door and run.
Fold arms in defiance of the dumb task master.
Stand ground when the sergeant shouts guilty and
‘bout turn
for blowing up a latrine in a war hardly begun.
Walk out of the lectures in the fabricated
semester.
Tell the apopletic professor to go talk to the
wall.
Bring down the boardroom despot when no one else
will,
with a poem to make him smart till the end of
time.
This is what writers can do, this is the rebel
rhyme
their rarest craft from childhood builds into
them,
for which even those who agree with them give no
thanks.
Be prepared to attack, be ready to break ranks.
Be ready one island night to commit the cardinal
sin.
Break radio silence, be what your craft made you
for
through the growing years, this is not latrine
war.
Send out the fibre of your voice, talk the lost
plane in;
and be recognised not by commanding dunces but a
crew of eight
who shall engrave a medal for you out of
schoolroom slate.
SCHADERNFREUDE
(The shudder of pleasure at someone else’s proper end)
Have you ever heard the pounding of the dogs?
In the paddock at your window on the morning
farm,
ravenous for the kill they sound worse than dogs,
and the silence of the hare defines the hunt,
hare still alive, its jumping brain in front,
its high and apprehended speed a pelting storm;
its brown ears battened down are deaf to all but
god,
and the shudder of the dogs defines
schadernfreude.
To their pleasure in its death in the warmth of
the morning farm,
the plump squeal entering and the gaunt one going
out,
I shift in a bed bitten by an emptiness of dogs
killing for the sake of it, killing things to
come;
and afterwards listen to dogs yodelling in the
yard,
the silence of whose hare defines schadernfreude,
and begin the day by fondling ravenous jaws gone
slack.
We are the farm, we kill, we take our paddocks
back.
ALADDIN AND THE GHOST AT THE GUILTY DOOR
- To The Fallen -
There’s no pleasing anyone
once you go to war.
There’s more to survival than returning.
One climbs fast as the rest fall down,
and to the ghost at the guilty door,
who does get home, goes nothing.
In the whole household of his life
the sly ones keep on thieving.
They pick his pocket while he’s dining,
perhaps to find in his heart a leaf
of the tree of knowledge they resent,
or a wound still there that they badly want.
Up the steps of their masked dungeon, damp
to a medieval door,
they slide like confessional instruments
to extract and possess his worst offence.
The worst wound of his woebegone war
healed to their want of the wonderful lamp
of some Aladdin, a sesame magic
like his at their guilty door.
Even the most residual gift
of a genie should have been theirs like logic.
There’s no pleasing the angels of theft
once you go to war.
THE ADVERSARY ON THE COIN
I found my legs this morning, and I caught my
breath.
It took continents to tell me what I’m dealing
with:
adversary language, angering the negro head
of Hannibal on the alpine coin he used to cut it
dead.
Rome’s oratory was never the same again,
nor Munich’s with the gutteral sound of
Lebensraum’s
Sieg Heil in halls of red and black that thumped
reprisal home.
I’m waiting under the house in the cage that I
came in.
You’ve only to let me out, you may recall, and
drums
will beat on the battlefields we go building from.
Like age I rub my aching ribs beneath the tubs,
ready to escape like Carthage and Munich again.
Fools point our great succession at fugitive self-
deaths,
to the bunker's muzzle and the Mussolini noose
and, somewhere in miasma where a minaret sobs,
to the self-dealt desert poison on a painted
Roman vase.
But we suspire like Beelzebubs inclined to spin
the continents about with every battlefield that
breathes
ancestral adversary into the path of a speaking
coin.
I hear you on the floor above dreaming your domain,
mapping out the measure of the derangement we
begin.
I've found my legs, I've caught my breath, come down
and bring me in.
- David Rowbotham