Note: Aengus refers Yeat’s Song of the Wandering Aengus, and Maskull is the protagonist in David Lindsay’s novel, A Voyage to Arcturus.
The moon is not waiting
The sun is not waiting
They hear no more words
And Aengus is asleep in his bed
Dreaming of a faraway treasure chest of gray
coins
As if the whole object and its contents were an
unapproachable single atom in a galaxy of
impersonal statements
Indifferent to storm tides
Here is a dead face
Who was he
What did he have faith in
Before he fell
Was he Maskull
Who found his way back to the tower
And held his ground against invading particles
of illusion
Gathering themselves into shapes of familiar
speechless souls
Walking along the streets of noisy cities
Was he a soldier in the red sand
I know this: the beast gives birth to a child and
later the child gives birth
And one day a free soul stands up and has fire in
his veins and moves against the sleeping world
There is a distilling process in souls and a
proliferating principle in minds
And these massive collective human clusters we
see around us disintegrate
Rot
Putrify
The compost of an unknown garden
The free soul calls in a new world
***
(Poem 456 reprinted here with permission of the of the author.)
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