Poetry
Inside
Inside her is
a landscape
a smell of lemons
a walled garden of green peppers
drying apricots
wet earth
mysterious
irrelevance
of time.
She offers
her nights
of love as easily
as putting on Mozart
or the coffee pot
or opening a door
into the summer street
and being undressed
in sunlight.
She lets you see
why love is
not so difficult.
Don Maclennan
>Love
Through an open window
floats the skeleton
of a garden spider,
the living thing that spun
its gleaming tapestry
between the trees
catching the morning light.
It settles like a dancer
on my desk, and a breath
can blow it away.
The pity of our lives is
never to be anything properly,
loving out of need, not strength.
Spiders defy the universe:
they spin and eat, do not feel need.
With us love thrives on being incomplete.
Don Maclennan
Funeral II
My nephew said, "You're getting old.
Isn't it time you thought about the Lord?"
How absolute his three-piece suit.
Momentarily I was back at school
having neglected to perform a duty-
Latin homework, or come late for assembly.
I have been thinking all my life
about such things; when I read
Plato or Ecclesiastes
I become an exercise of mind,
resurrected in the rich concision
Of that ancient poetry.
I was offended by his zeal,
his wish that I would not arrive
without a visa at my destination.
We'd just consigned his father-in-law
and were having tea and biscuits
in the hall. It was mid-summer,
everyone was sweating.
After the weak display of grief
refreshments were a great relief.
A cluster of life-scarred widows
welcomed my sister to the sorority
of empty beds and bodily denial.
She looked stern, remote, defiant,
flattered perhaps, or reassured
being the centre of attention.
Her husband'd got short shrift,
a gentle man who never made a stir,
did his duty and obeyed the law,
played six instruments,
but never had much fun at home.
The minister could not find much to say;
it was a great relief to him to ask us all to pray.
It is a strange religion thinks you
happy only when you're dead -
he with his three piece policy
inviting me to be not me.
I am not worth much anyway,
and like to live inside with
the ironies of impermanence.
Who needs insurance after all
when our future is conjectural?
It may be true that this is where we die,
but more important,
this is where we live.
Don Maclennan
On Bad Days
On bad days I walk in the garden
to my favourite place
and imagine I will
cut a truncheon of wild fig
and stick it in the ground
where I can watch it
grow like a cathedral.
Nobody complains about cathedrals
that they threaten habitation,
block up drains or take away the sun.
If they have to build a new road
to circumnavigate one, they do so.
I'd like to say one day
that you and I
are building a cathedral.
Don Maclennan
Let Us Give Thanks
Let us give thanks
to those who gave
trace or beauty
to the world:
a silver plate,
a Kilim, or a text
as things to contemplate.
There are still women
whose generosity
confounds reason;
men whose strength is clean;
those who do not posses
but live providentially,
who do not wish
to have, but be.
Don Maclennan
