Poetry feature: After the Ash Clouds – A Poem for King Lear

For when did a play deliver any justice?

He wrote in a drunken daze –
a long-faced father
writing a gigantic
storming tragedy,
pulled out from his own
smallness.

This story moves through
the dark times.

Some total regime.
Lear’s union,
strung together
by brutish greed.
Where’s there’s nothing you can’t buy
and Cornwall
is one man’s land.

No wonder he divides
and self-destructs.

Wickedness seeps down
and daughters spit back at
their father’s face –
banish him to heaths.

I don’t think trees can grow in ash.
But the players shout that they’re alive
and don’t want to be blasted away.

disaster outperforms disaster.

On this stage,
men can be brought
down to tell old wives tales
and think they are gods.

Ashamed to see his sometime daughter,
who tells the truth.
Time stops
before they can forgive each other.

Son watches his estranger’s face carved out
by his own soldiers,
and he can only squirm back.

The parent sees the cruelty
of the child,
the child sees the inadequacy
of the parent,

and the world runs out of battles
to offer.

—

Do they share the guilt for this catastrophe?

Do they share
the guilt for this catastrophe?
Or are they under greater
terrors?

I’m reminded of a real Lear,
who once led a revolution
to free his occupied country,
and twisted into
it’s worst despot.

Tanks trudging in.
Imperialist armies corner off
every fox hole.
The old king and his crew go from
exile to exile,
wondering what nation did he really
ever have.

He suits himself while
a death camp is being constructed
around him.

But that was years ago.
That Lear is long dead.
But there is still
his kingdom,
trapped in Auschwitz.

A place where time stops,
where man confronts his most base self.
scrapping
over the last scrap of bread.
working
in mud that only sinks deeper.

yet, such is the mystery of things,

a fool in Rabah does a show on rubble
for local kids
and there’s an old codger in Khan Younis
who, about to faint from the heat,
asks somebody –

“Pray, undo this button.”

If they survive, they survive with a mission.

Something which the glover’s son
could never have foreseen,
he could only write it down.

A warning
from the beyond
to be true to the best within us,
though the gods fall.