Description
A note from the poet
It is divided into four groups. The first is brief and runs over the sloth of the past — famous figures in lower situations.
The second group is larger and weather-wise, as well as its effects.
The third is considerably the largest and most important of the three.
The fourth is conclusion.
— Ian Rockel
Introduction — by Ian Mune
Not so much an introduction, more an invitation …
The poet tells us that Nostradamus Said So is divided into four groups of poems. Outside the lepidorium, the first, “is brief and runs over the sloth of the past — famous figures in lower situations.” Lower situations indeed. Where Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ patriotically memorialised a vast military blunder as a paean to courage, Rockel notes of a young soldier …
… he stood to attention
as Russians blunted knives on him,
becoming a model for Empire
Famous figures seen perhaps through the Common Man’s eyes. Move forward to the so-called Great War and our Common Man fares little better …
Short time ago
we heard the whistles blow
to go up top
where our serge
does little
to hold out hail —
these pellets made of lead
tear jackets, bone and head.
The second group, Of this day … and, perhaps, another “is larger and weatherwise, as well as its effects.” No backward looking here. Our Common Man is right in the middle of the action of today …
Then earthquakes
shake us apart;
cars become houses,
floods take our vegetables,
hills slide on tiny towns
Rockel-world juxtaposes the commonplace with the cosmic, a cosmos populated by uneasy spirits as likely to go howling by as to drop in for breakfast, all played out to the harmonies of a cosmic orchestra.
So much noise
at the end of the world
but it was surprisingly quiet
for a cataclysm —
as though some of the instruments
were missing
or the score was lost.
It calls to mind the observation of eighteenth-century German poet, philosopher and mystic, Friedrich von Hardenberg: “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” These poems take us not into Reason’s world of who, how, what, when, where and why, but rather into that internal place we call experience. We wake from a dream and our reason tells us, “What happened in that dream is not possible.” But in our memory the dream was a truthful, lived experience. So somewhere in that dream-world, we have experiences that reason cannot accommodate.
Fortunately, in spite of the collapse of the Universe, Nature shares Common Man’s droll humour …
Cockatoo shrills:
“Still alive! Still alive!”
A humour perhaps not tolerated by whatever demons control this disintegrating world …
I shall be hung, strung
and quartered
for taking the matter
so lightly:
they’ll have to hurry.
Semi-dark tales of change in which the lights decline, the third group, while still situated in the cosmos, pivots toward the first person and relationships.
How soft your voice
among the stars;
but will I find you
in the billion miles?
And is the cosmos perhaps not so unrelentingly cold?
Some moments,
the rising sun
gives me the sense
that I am also,
momentarily,
skyborne.
The fourth group, Epitaph poems, is conclusion.
How sweet the birds sound,
as we rise
from burning bushes
and trembling ground.
But it’s a droll observation from the third group that echoes in the mind …
For what it’s worth,
I feel it’s out of place,
for someone out in space
to tell the end.
Enjoy!
— Ian Mune
