Magi
– I was a charming and respected teacher,
an influential man with everything
to lose by speaking out. I spoke. Now, who’s
for Astro-Psychics class, Messiah Theory,
or Further Myth? This crock of frankincense
was my sardonic way (I’m famous for
those wry asides) of saying: well, yes, frankly
it’s all nonsense.
– In dreams…
– And may I add
(as world authority on processes
of mummification from the earliest
Dynastic to the Ptolemies) it’s good
to have escaped the lab, to sleep beneath
the stars – one hangs there so seductively
impelling us as if she’s telling us
through wink and hint and dark suggestiveness
our necessary route – and see a way
that promises to bypass bodily
decay without the need for what I’ve brought
the child (wrapped here): embalming oils, the best
and purest treatment for mortality
humanity has yet –
– For miles and miles
my only podium has been this hump.
And in it – all a beast requires. My friends,
we wanted more. Yet, far from your arcane
retorts and flasks, your glazed fork lightning, minds
made fit by study to confront the cosmos,
like me, do you begin to feel that you
have found some secret in this gentler sway,
that cloud-free sky, a sandscape of repeating
nursery dunes?
– Let’s rest.
– In dreams, I reach
a shining building where the gold’s not stacked
but scattered, so much of it that it’s left
for goats or stuffed in scarecrows, valueless,
and all that’s rare and longed for in that place
is wood, rough cross-beams, all their dreaming hung
with iron nails.
– Can you feel this too, friends?
A wholeness, wholly blinding you to all
but one star, one clear scent out of the west?
It’s growing dark. The desert ends beyond
that ridge, I’m sure of it. And if these moths
are not archangels, I’m… But I’m afraid
I have no dazzle left. An early class
tomorrow then, you magi, so good night.
John Greening has won the Bridport and TLS Prizes and received a Cholmondeley Award. He is a judge for the Eric Gregory Awards. His 2013 collections are To the War Poets (www.carcanet.co.uk) and Knot (www.worplepress.com). Poetry Masterclass (2011) is published by www.greenex.co.uk.