The Feast of Autumn
Cycle
I
I
At twilight,
The crows fly to their roosting place in the east,
Flocks of hundreds
Flocks of thousands
Like black witches on brooms
Away from the sun, from the fading light.
Each day is shorter than the day before.
The nights are growing longer.
Soon the wind begins from the north.
That autumn wind
That sweeps down from the polar lands
Every year
To drive off the last frightened vestige
Of summer,
Sweeping in its savage blast
The dead and dying leaves of autumn
Driving them in swarms
Like frightened wraiths from
Across the moribund earth.
The tide heaves against the wet sand
Strewn with dead kelp, brown and rotting in the cold air,
And the surf begins its winter onslaught
Against fragile retaining walls.
Dogs are everywhere,
Running, barking, digging in the sand,
Sniffing each other’s bums,
Fighting, wagging their tails,
Shitting without shame
In front of their adoring humans who
Stand by dutifully
With plastic bags.
On their way home they
Deposit in trash containers their little bags full of dog shit,
They will pass along streets and lanes.
Their pedigreed dogs will lift their legs to relieve themselves,
Only just missing the outstretched legs
Of beggars and homeless people
Huddled in doorways
En route to their luxury condos.
II
The wind is blowing tonight,
The first cold blast of the season.
In sheltered homes we turn up the volume
Of TV’s and stereos
And we forget this portent of change.
Sheltered from the cold air
We ignore
The transformation that is coming upon us,
In this autumn, this season of death,
Heeding not the Earth’s cry, our Mother’s demand
That we render back to her that which is hers,
What she has given us in trust,
Our frail bodies that perish slowly on the bone
No less than the dead leaves lining gutters
And clogging drains.
Red leaves, gold, yellow, orange and brown,
Colours of mortality, dying and death,
Some retaining traces of the soothing green that absorbed for the
sacred trees
The solar nourishment
And delighted our eyes, had our eyes been open
To the incandescent splendour
Of light reflected on foliage
While we jogged along the forest trail,
Gasping like dying horses
Plugged into our i-pods
And blind to the naked beauty
Of the luminescent glory
Surrounding us.
The joggers run in every season
In this city of fools, on crowded sidewalks or forest trails,
So obsessed with chimerical perfection
Of body beautiful and perfection of limb and form
So as to miss the glorious drama
Played out around us and within our weak fragile bodies
The cycles of life, dying, death, rebirth and life and death again,
So God has given us Autumn,
This feast of mortality,
This statement of the temporary,
This annual reminder that death, feared or welcome
Is our birthright,
Is asked of us,
Demanded,
And fearing it or not,
So we all march and dance into her soft and waiting embrace.
III
Tonight the crows fly to the east,
In wave upon wave of scattered flocks,
Their feathers black as the night that shall welcome them.
Their sonorous caws linger unheard
Over the motor traffic that spews its fumes of death
Into the air
To hover over this city of fools
While guilt-laden mothers and work-exhausted fathers
Prepare for ungrateful progeny
Less than adequate dinners
From convection microwaves
And kitchens blessed
With every modern convenience.
Wars in distant lands are brought into
Living rooms that never seem satisfactorily furnished
On wide screens and plasma screens
In between pompous lies and soporifics
Muttered by presidents and prime ministers
In between commercials
That hold our attention hostage
With promises of joy, satisfaction and eternal happiness
For the swipe of a VISA or debit card.
In regions we will never know have existed
The crows will settle for the night,
Resting in the cold air,
Heeding not the stars, the clouds or the rain
That will fall again
To reunite with the earth
The dead and fallen leaves.
The wind rattles the windows with a promise of death
But leaves untouched the glowing computer screens
That illumine our lives
Until the first power failure of the season
Plunges us into darkness, despair
And portents of the death that awaits us.
Second Cycle
I
It began with the harvest:
Harvest moon, harvest of wheat, barley and corn,
Harvest of apples, peaches, plums and pears,
Harvest of grapes to be crushed into the wine of Christ’s blood,
And the bloody wine of Epicurean snobs,
And hazelnuts, walnuts and beechnuts
Scattered across the fecund earth,
And birds in millions fleeing the coming frost and bitter ice
Guided by the secrets of the stars
That shine like cold portents
In the gathering night
That warns of this season of death.
The air was still warm, but for the cooler nights,
And we wandered the streets
With tanned naked limbs
To ward off the coming winter
That for us would never arrive,
While in cafes and on sidewalk patios we sipped red wine and strong
espresso
And mollified our stirring conscience with fair trade coffee.
We walked, and dressed and groomed
And pampered with toys and treats
Our pedigreed dogs
While ignoring the homeless beggars standing next to our café tables,
Heedless of the waning light of the season,
We tortured ourselves inside vile-smelling gyms
With metal instruments
Our penance for our self-indulgence,
For not being thin, muscular or lissome,
Expiation of guilt for hating our bodies
That seem never to match
The air-brushed and computer-enhanced
Baby dolls and studlies
That laugh in our face
And mock us for those
Love handles and cellulite
And skinny arms
That beg for the blessing
Of lyposuction and steroids,
While forgetting ourselves, those selves
That emerge in our dreams
While we bury them throughout
lives of running, flight and departure,
Only to ignore in the artificial balm of meditation and yoga the hot
and relentless pursuit
Of the unreckoned self,
That dogs us
From wellness seminar to party to night club
To nights passed in the beds of successive strangers
The three-headed hound of heaven, hell
And purgatory
Whose rabid and hungry muzzles
Already dampen our heels as terrified we run
Away from our day of reckoning.
In ragged flocks of hundreds, the crows are flying.
In evening flocks of thousands,
They fly away from the dying light
Into the darkness of the East.
II
The fat turkey carcass lies
Golden and aromatic on the buffet table,
Surrounded by family, extended family,
Friends of extended family,
United in collective amnesia,
Of the eccentric artist cousin,
The daughter with a mental illness,
The brother who is purportedly gay,
And other silent absences from this feast of genocide.
Thanksgiving Day, Columbus Day, El Dia de las razas.
A day to pause, eat like a glutton and give thanks among
Relatives you cannot stand
For the prosperity and freedom of this great land we live in as less
than welcome squatters,
This land of condominium towers and houses that only the rich can
afford to live in,
This land of fashion slaves, dog owners and homeless beggars,
This land that screams in silent outrage
In the absence of its indigenous people
Murdered in the millions, this day of
Genocide.
Six million Jews can’t be wrong.
Neither one and a half million Armenians
(Serve this Turkey up for Thanksgiving),
Nor nearly a million Tutsis.
The crows scavenge in dumpsters among discarded turkey and stuffing,
Before their evening flight into the dark east.
They lived here, long before us, these crows.
And they will survive us
Long after our forgettable passing.
Then comes All Hallows, the pagan’s Christmas,
Drunken louts parading in dresses they would never otherwise be seen
in,
While brats of all ages terrify dogs with fire crackers and roman
candles.
Nothing remains in its grave on Halloween,
And soon the rotting pumpkins will be reunited
With the earth from which they once sprang.
Unnoticed, in churches the day after
The Saints are celebrated
As in clouds of witnesses
They descend from the celestial throne
To stand and adore among us
The living God who never dies.
Then comes All Souls’
A day for solemn walks
In damp and chilly graveyards
Silent again but never entirely still,
As black crows perch and caw from lonely grey headstones.
III
Before phallic cenotaphs,
They stand
Each year, in the cold rain,
Older,
More bent,
More crippled.
Every year they are fewer
And soon they too shall follow their fallen comrades
To the damp and indifferent earth.
Everywhere from lapels and coats
Glow the indignant red poppies,
Like bullet wounds
From battles still being fought and waged.
The old soldiers,
Who shall never forget the beauty and strength of the young bodies,
The ideals and aspirations of their young unjaded souls
They had compromised, squandered and sacrificed on battlefields
And in air-raids,
Who sacrificed not themselves,
But were themselves sacrificed, by their lying governments
Get quietly drunk in the legion,
The deathly shrieks of bagpipes ringing in their heads,
Reinforcing through each round the lies and propaganda of war
That sustains the myth
That sustains their memory
Of that intolerable carnage,
That vast devastation of global metallic rage that
Sent Virginia Woolf to the river of her drowning,
Muttering under her breath while London was being bombed by German
warplanes, as the waters rose over her lovely head,
These words:
“All that completeness: ravished.”
Most of London and her noble inhabitants still stood,
But Dresden was incinerated with all of its people.
Six million Jews, you say.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki I reply.
Nanking and Korean comfort women, you remind me…
But is it really a matter of who started it, when it was all ended
In the same abattoir, the same charnel house,
The same death and destruction of human flesh and human souls
That without their nations, their dictators, their lying politicians,
Their national myths and victors’ feasts
And victims anguish?
Do we really hear the cries of our dead, screaming for vindication,
Above the love songs of the blessed?
Third Cycle
I
They shine in the cold sunlight of late November,
Incandescent and bejeweled from last night’s rain
That scourged the homeless and flooded the earth.
The naked branches, divested of leaves,
Stripped of their raiment,
Liberated from their burden of glory,
Gleam against the blue sky,
The rhythms of life silent and dormant
Beneath the buds already forming for the coming spring.
Crows black and glossy like polished ebony
Caw at each other in the branches,
Light dancing in reflected gold and silver from their black wings.
The leaves have returned to the earth,
And feed the soil as they die into the new life
That will spring again from the rich soil.
Flanked by plastic holly and plastic Santas
We wander purposefully through malls
Serenaded by ancient carols made trite and consumer-friendly
To assuage our guilt
And staunch
That wound of hunger
That bleeds forever from our undeveloped souls.
Outside, an extra buck for a beggar stimulates four seconds
Of warmth, kindness and well-being
That gets snuffed out
As the boot extinguishes the glowing butt on the sidewalk
Decked in holiday style
And we try not to think
Of our state of paralysis
Of the helplessness that binds us hand and foot
Of bringing change, light and transformation
Into the self-devouring serpent
That has engorged us.
Even as winter approaches
There are tiny birds concealed in the naked twigs,
Blue Steller’s jays screaming from evergreen firs
And flickers adorning the blue sky
With the crimson lining of their outstretched wings.
Everywhere the crows are cawing.
II
Death rolls like a haggard junkie on a skateboard among us,
Through public squares, parking lots and along crowded sidewalks.
Death creeps among us like black serpents,
Coiling round street lamps and touching our ankles with their
flickering red tongues.
Death dances, a pale ballerina, leaping and pirouetting across our
dreams
That we wake from in the middle of rainy nights.
The crows have filled the city
With their black and shiny presence
While overhead the raven soars.
The wind renews its force
And scatters the dead leaves,
Cigarette wrappers
And discarded butts,
And creeps into every tightly-sealed room
Through every tightly-locked door
To visit our dreams
And watch us
Like a dark-shrouded guardian.
The death wind of November carries on its chill robe
The muttered curses of the shivering homeless,
Dropping them like love letters onto your pillow.
The crows have returned to their resting place,
Again comes the rain,
Borne on the winds
Of violated innocence,
Uprooting and tossing like Popsicle sticks
The ancient fir and cedar.
Then the clouds are pushed on
Revealing the naked interstellar space,
Orion, the hunter draws his bow
And aims his arrow over us
At our darkened bedroom windows,
And again we wake from the visions,
From the auguries of the night.
III
Winter has begun
Though the winter solstice is still more than three weeks away.
Bundled in my long coat and thick sweater,
My head protected by
The faded black toque I found
In a park many years ago.
Dodging idiots driving with cell phones
And the toxic trail
Of second hand smoke
I greet without speaking,
Acknowledge without looking at
My brethren on the street,
Seated on the sidewalk,
Huddled in doorways,
Walking and staggering,
And muttering and shrieking
And singing
And talking
And tripping over pedigree dogs,
Dragged on leashes
By nicely dressed strangers
Trying not to run in fear
From the human sacrifice that surrounds us.
Orion has stretched and drawn his bow.
Orion has aimed at us his sharpest arrow
Not at
But through
The crows flying overhead to the dark east.
In this silence of autumn when no birds sing,
In this silence of death
That will swallow up
The noise and din that surrounds me,
I begin my advent,
Prostrated in the dead and living earth
From where I behold, worship and adore
The light that never dies.
