MICHAEL BARTHOLOMEW-BIGGS is a semi-retired mathematician and a fairly active poetry editor of the on-line magazine London Grip. His most recent books are Poems in the Case (Shoestring Press) – which embeds a poetry collection in a murder mystery – and The Man Who Wasn’t Ever Here (Wayleave Press) which is a poetic biography of his Irish grandfather.
Notebook
He is editing the day
in pencil.
Five minutes more
to be allowed for coffee.
Outside the lake is nearly empty
and the swans are gone.
Across the street he knows there is
a ballerina in a bed-sit.
She poses with the curtains open.
His neighbour is a man
who has no family. Was that
by choice or circumstance?
Can anyone exist
without a context?
Girls are whispering
behind him
He’ll later claim he knew
what they were saying
Are we sure
we are where we’re supposed to be?
A falling ashtray breaks
his train of thought.
What will be lost If it stays broken?
He’s running late already –
not his fault –
but it will fall to him
to get the meeting back
on schedule
I’ll have to cut my contribution
In the past
this has always saved the situation:
this time he’s convinced
it’s going to end in tears.
© Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
Manifestations
And the living creatures darted to and fro, I saw a wheel upon the earth beside the living creatures, their construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel…. and when the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose. Ezekiel 1:14-19
Magic mushrooms! Unbelieving friends
suggest why Heaven – or perception’s doors –
flew open for Ezekiel and left him,
shocked and awestruck, seeing things
like gyroscopes and helicopters
in advance of L da Vinci.
Ezekiel avoided diagrams,
preferring poetry to blueprints;
hence his engines – less mechanically
analysed than Leonardo’s –
have attracted so much extra
terrestrial conjecturing.
So fantasists, who fancy aliens
can navigate our planet via ley lines
(and believe art deco doodles
over cornfields cannot all be hoaxes),
claim that space-time travellers
allowed Ezekiel to see a future
three millennia away. Perhaps
he got a film-strip glimpse of locust-gunships
stuttering across Iraqi desert,
stop-start – like the freeze-frame hovering
of hummingbirds he’d never known –
and bringing down on Babylon
blunt attempts at causing shock and awe.
© Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
Applying the whitewash
… they shed blood and kill people to make unjust gain. Prophets whitewash these deeds Ezekiel 22:27-28
The whitewash would be bad enough –
smeared across that tumbled wall
of crumbling mortar, mildewed stones
and sliding down in clotting dribbles
varicose as old men’s veins.
The whitewash would be bad enough
as camouflage – say nothing of
its counterfeit of making good –
like sugared icing that can’t smooth
the bitter edge of part-burned cake.
The whitewash would be bad enough
but the gap was worse – it was
a forecast of complete collapse
and put an end to all pretending
whiter whitewash might yet work.
© Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
Filling the gap
So I looked for a man who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap … Ezekiel 22: 30
The gap was where a man should stand –
while it was narrow he could touch
both broken ends; and, like a gate,
admit the truth that justified
whatever reckoning was due.
The gap was where a man should stand
who knew the swerve and surge of tides
enough to make a barrier
and save a few dry, unspoiled goods
from being swamped or swept away.
The gap was where a man should stand:
but when no local hero came
the greedy space demanded more
than human-sized repair.
It took
one feeding trough, two wooden beams.
© Michael Bartholomew-Biggs