Poetry Blog No 173 Day Voyage

DAY VOYAGE

 

This poem is about what we tend to pass us by unaware in the course of a very "average" day. The setting is the city of Sydney and suburbs some decades ago. It is not intended to be about the life of a particular person as in " A Day in the Life of ", the "Day Voyager" is simply an "Everyman" or, perhaps, better put, an "Anyone."

Inspired by an old Moody Blues concept album "Days of Future Past", this was originally a youthful and ambitious project that has been revised sporadically over the years.

 

DAY VOYAGE

Silence holds the view

The sky is dark with that far darkness

that harbours worlds-

south winter sky

where Sirius ascends before the dawn.

In cloudless, last night-vastness shines

the radiance of blue-white suns.

Intense,

bright centres of

the darkness-filling

but unseen paths of ancient light,

they are so far

they seem but gleaming points-

the sparkling stars that are

still held as hunter, Greek Orion,

though southern-seen, reversed in form;

or from another dream and time,

three brothers in their sky canoe.

So stars draw patterns of past myth

but stellar distance leaves

earth's detail sealed in night.

And Venus voyages in eastern vastness.

Not like the high and wild,

creative scatter of the stars,

upon earth's greater dark

lie straighter constellations:-

the lamplight pattern of the streets.

And by the streets sit shadow shapes -

set rows of grey-dark houses.

Cold dew has gathered on

the gardens and the grass.

One house, like many, from without

is brick, in form still vague to sight..

That one, like many, from within

is rooms and walls, dividing night .

And walls are vague, surrounding sleepers,

whose seeing’s sealed, dissolved in dreams.

There one is sleeper, still in stillness, still

in slumber blanketed upon his bed.

And now his view is all within.

And now within awareness inner image,

strange in a dream-strange way,

is gliding down a nameless road

towards new awakening of day.

Gaze through a shadow window, view

this traveller from darkness,

still hidden in the hidden light,

shell of a voyager, soon born anew

from dream and deep,

noumenal world of night.

But softly, softly rising on

the wide sky darkness,

the last star vastness,

already light

is metamorphosing

the far line of the east.

So from awakening of dawn

first faint illumination

clarifies immensity.

Earth turns from here towards day

and on horizon light’s ascension climbs

and wakes all colours and

all details of the scene-

the shapes of streets and concrete curbing,

the forms of footpaths, fences, flowers,

the gardens and the houses

with curtained window-sheen.

And trees with lightward-lifted leaves,

emerge from nights' amorphous

nebula of darkness.

Now earth takes form to sight,

condensing into vision,

appearing from dawn's image of

the archetypal birth of light.

Cold carpet, clinging low

to short-mown grass,

pale spread of frost grows white,

lit by the rising shine.

In brightening, still rooms now sleepers stir

and yawn and stretch, rub eyes and rise

from night to take first nourishment from day.

The dreamer wakes,

condensing consciousness to clarity,

now waking to the waking world to see...

reborn to radiance.

The risen sun, arousing life,

endows east air with golden fire.

Day's traveller

annuls awareness of the night

to marshal armies of day thoughts

and glance at charting memory

to briefly plan

for future hours.

And in his time there is no time

to view the time now present.

Now he

attends to tasks preparing day.

He shaves and showers

and dries and dresses

and briefly breakfasts, hearing

new morning tales of new events,

all far from his day’s circle,

all from a speaking box.

Day's mind is bright and quick to see

the surface of reality,

just as the sun, sight's mentor,  
the focus of the given light,

drowns out a thousand stars in blue.

Unnoticed on the kitchen wall

a stream of tiny black ants seeks

small plunder for their hidden nest.

               Anew, day's voyager begins

familiar journeyings.

He walks the paths of habit, footpath beat,

to where timed bus and he can meet.

And habit-blind, his mind

still recollects, half-hazily,

from days now done;

or plans for purposes in those to come.

For idly followed thought

is tyrant to awareness,

forever walking courses gone

or future-vague, as yet to be.

And all the glory of the world slips by.

Far in the eastern deeps of blue,

day’s one and only star

is single fountain of abounding light,

endowing eyes

with all the wide sweep of their sight.

Held hanging from a tiny thorn,

reflecting light’s arising,

from garden bush of roses,

a dewdrop is still gleaming,

white cynosure of morning-

a star in leaves and flowers.

Short cherry trees are wintering

in lines along the grey road’s edge.

Their nets of roots

catch nourishment from earth

and sunken rain;

cling to the grip of ground.

               Above, bare branches and fine twigs

form fractal patterns on

blue smoothness of clear winter sky;

each bearing spiralled buds

awaiting spring’s awakening.

While on the land-embracing,

wide static net of streets,

the catch of cars

is gathering to centre:

the morning journeying

to city core.

Blue buses gather gatherings

of people waiting to be moved,

each taking one new path through day’s

complexities of destinies;

each on a single journey

with all the other travellers

within the time of light,

and all sweep towards a focus

to pass beneath an arch of steel,

across the ageing, giant bridge

that holds a path across the harbour.

Day’s traveller now sits within

time-purchased moving space:

a seat transported, vehicled, travelling

on fuel-fired wheels.

Now scenes of shop and house and street

flash by too fast for detailed sight.

Above the roads’

condensing busyness, over

the smoke-grey horizon,

a scavenging wind

bears a single raven.

The harbour surface, rippling ceaseless change,

plays movements of sun glitterings.

The evanescent coruscations,

like time’s symphonic flow of happenings,

drowns out skyscraper stillness-

the thousand glinting windows in

anonymous, rectangular similarity.

The bus halts. Sixty travellers

depart upon day’s separate paths

as each shall trace a single way

within the destiny of day.

Within a park a yellow daisy

now imperceptibly

completes its silent, slow unfolding,

its petals spread as if in adoration

of time’s arising of the radiant.

And blades of grass

are leaning towards illumination

to trace the cycle of the day

in living mystery of light.

And trees drink morning shine.

Day’s voyager strolls by

the shapes and colours of shop windows,

displayed to please, to lure sight.

Yet in his mind vague shapes and colours

of scenes and faces, all things past,

compete with images of present sense.

Crowds hurry onward, swept within

the streams of peak-hour rush:

the morning flow that drains

into the reservoirs of office blocks.

Beneath the concrete at their feet

is world unseen: Earth’s thousands of

dark miles to planet core.

Through a break in concrete bareness

two blades of grass have forced

their patient way into the light.

A sparrow in the gutter

is startled into sudden flight.

White clouds sail on through blue air sea.

Red traffic light stops carlines moving.

The workers reach the hives.

Glass doors gape open at their footfall.

Lifts lift to levels at a numbered touch.

Day’s traveller has reached

the end of morning journey.

He sits within a room

where all is rightly-angled,

where all is surfaces of flatness,

and on the flat desk sorts

the papers and the forms

to check for strict correctness.

And all throughout the city’s bounds

the thousands of day workers follow

the patterns of their destined tasks.

High in the air in rooms

within the straight, steel-structured towers

regiments of office workers

tap at computer keyboards,

sealed from urban bustle by

integuments of concrete.

And shop assistants serve behind

the plastic of smooth counters.

And taxi drivers navigate

the streams of traffic turbulence.

The judges and the jurors sit in judgement;

the shoppers seek their heart’s desire

or find supplies for days to come.

The bankers and the brokers see

the figures on their screens;

and many gather for the meeting of ideas.

And all around

a light wind blows

and earth spins, unperceived.

And all this world

goes spiralling south west of Vega-

the apex of the solar way.

The zodiac of hours has ticked to twelve.

Released, the office workers crowd

the footpaths, walk within the grace

of warming, winter sunshine

with food in packets or in boxes

or queue to trade for nourishment.

Within grey streets

a grass-green park

is set and in it sit

at lunch loose-scattered groups of people.

Down from the heights of air-vast blue

come flutterings of flocks of pigeons,

crumb-hungry, strutting,

bright-eyed, alert.

And catching sun, a fountain sprays

its sparkling drops upon

a stone Diana, motionless forever,

moon huntress of a time forever gone.

And people sit upon

the star-born carpet of the soil-preserving grass.

The wind, a child of sun, lifts leaves

and rustles their light-woven forms

in clusters on the cultivated trees.

They sit in sunshine dream.

But time stays passing. They return.

They trace once more familiar paths

in fixed, street pattern

to work the second session of day’s tasks.

And on those streets walk others,

like shadowed souls,

whose clothes are worn and soiled,

whose homes are railway stations and

park benches in the dark and cold,

who ever live

in poverty between prosperity

and ever are passed by unseen.

Day’s traveller is sitting, working.

He trades, in chains of hours,

mind’s slavery, his breathing time-

the labouring not its creation,

in boring repetition’s strain.

Thus time is dulled and passes as slow pain.

Afternoon tiredness

mellows his limbs.

Vague memories

emerge to mind-

kaleidoscope of half-completed images,

whose power is presence of days vanished.

Earth’s turning shifts the sun to westward spaces.

He pauses; glances through the glass to clearness

of light on brown and greyness

on brick and steel and concrete form.

Two men, reduced to unreality,

stride distant scaffolding.

A crane rears futile challenge towards the sky.

The harsh and half-completed structure’s caught

against the curved,

soft architecture of the clouds.

And in the office window corner

a tiny, near transparent spider

lays claim to a little living space.

The microcosmic builder crafts its structure

with clinging threads, that in their thinness,

are tougher than those building beams of steel.

And crowds of twinkling dust motes drift

in slow procession, through the slanted rays

of sunlight, like far stars and worlds forever

on trails through vastness in the milky way.

Now people wish for work to end.

Clocks tick. The disc of day

is sinking towards the edge of dusk.

Now is the time of exodus from day.

Once more

streets gather crowds, the streams

of bustling, work-departing people,

departing for the night,

departing with declining of the light.

By the bus-stop footpath

grows a leafy,

vast tree of life, a Morton-Bay fig,

so slowly, so slowly that

its growing seems but stillness.

And in that stillness

the leaves lift skyward and

growth-sculptured roots

reach slowly downward,

down, down, unseen,

so solid that stillness,

the stillness where life flows,

down through dead asphalt to

soil’s nourishing in dark.

A bus arrives. Sixty travellers,

in silence gather from day’s separate paths,

to share their daily, half-hour journey

in their familiar anonymity, to flee

a city falling into shadows.

The tall and empty buildings darken

against the dusk.

The sun, in last appearance,

a circle of

day’s gold-white fire,

is drowned by earth’s dark edge.

Western windows of

blind skyscrapers pay

bright homage to last day

with brief and stolen, golden shine.

Now many thousand streetlights flicker on,

like graceless sentinels of night to be.

Last sunrays farewell earth.

Cloud-light

dissolves the edges of daysight.

A raven is returning to its roost,

wide-fleeing over fading spaces.

All beings spiral

on time towards night.

Habit’s cycle

moves day’s traveller

homeward in late dusk.

Thoughts gather in

the growing vagueness.

He tries to scry

the indeterminacy

of futures forming

before the prophecy

of reasoning.

Now darkness is enfolding

the clarity of day,

engulfing colour and sharp form

into the nebula of night.

A little liquid amber tree

sways quietly in the twilight wind,

soft-fluttering a few,

last, yellow, five-shaped leaves.

Dusk dwindles into dimness.

Day’s voyager returns, unlocks

a door to greater, inner dark.

His hand moves with

an easy habit’s care

to flick a switch and conjure

electric artifice of day.

The world is quieter now

and even distant highway growl grows dulled.

And through the gardens of the night

cats prowl on softly-padded paws.

Seas of night silence are rippled by

small, soft and soothing sounds:

the hum of night insects and a light

wind worrying leaves.

And people dine and wash their dishes.

Far in high, darkening heaven’s wide stillness

come the earth-humbling familiar, fair suns-

the vision of the universe

unfolding with day’s vanishing,

star patterns on the glide of night.

Yet people sit and watch electric screens,

mind lulled into a flickering display

of small and pointillisted images.

Away upon far darkness, sky-low constellations,

the worlds of Leo and the long,

star-headed Hydra, slide beneath

the dark, light-dotted

horizon of the city.

Rising are Aquila, Jupiter’s

nocturnal eagle,

and Lyra, Orpheus’

star-strung, star-singing instrument.

Now twisting Scorpio, with twinkling sting

and far Antares’ redly-shining eye,

is ruling darkness.

Day’s traveller

now settles into bed.

Bright against the light

a window moth in silence spreads

pale-patterned wings.

High in the vastness beams

the white light-point of Saturn,

great world with frozen rings,

far journeying,

far from its master sun.

Lying, quietening

into stillness,

now rememberings of day

pass the drowsy eye of mind,

as now his day’s awareness passes

to haziness, dissolving

into the darkness and the healing and

dimension of the dream.

All around

the houselights gradually

vanish in the ageing night,

leaving now the punctuated pattern

of streetlamp glare

alone.

The far sky harbours worlds.

The view is held by silence.