Blind Man

I recently came across a few poems I wrote ages ago, when I was about 19. Somehow I still like them, despite the fact that the influence of Dylan Thomas is overwhelmingly obvious. Here's one of them, which makes much of the insight common in Thomas's work that the end of things is implicit in their beginning.

BLIND MAN

This was my apocalypse,
The sharp light cracking on the eastern front
No more, the black dew frozen to my eyes,
Cut down my stature of senses.
Dark of my mother and the coffin womb
Flood again with crushing of the light.
.
In my dust-limbed anger of rough eclipse,
Marooned on four senses I dying hunt
The slipping Phoenix in his blazing lies;
I mold this terror to the first defenses,
The barrier circling this burrow tomb,
Caught in the budding flesh a hollow night.
.
And now below the sliding of the seas
I hear the soft dark mourning of the whale,
The moan of foaming salmon streaking home to die,
The curving dolphin in its grief.
The diving rain pins laughter to the oak --
I hear it choking in the summer's fist.
.
I feel the fury in the acorn freeze,
And under searing sun the rushing hail;
I breathe the scent of dying roses in July
And taste the bitter dew that drowns the morning leaf.
The autumn snaps again the stem that Eden broke,
And yearly shrouds the child the first moon kissed.
.
-C.M.C.-