The first day of spring

There is a shocking violence 

in the birds singing this morning

– this quiescent sunday morning –

perhaps they think that

after so many rainy, dirty days 

they ought to have the right to sing

for they do it so boisterously

– almost belligerent in the face of peace –

with a raw, unfettered rage

as if they cried ‘spring is here, spring is here!’

with a jagged knife to our throat

curdling both blood and coffee

like so many threats of burning the world down

they chant the behoveliness of revelling in

nature and life in drunken ecstasy 

upon pain of painful death

– enjoy or die –

– dance or die –

– fuck or die –

– and that’s final –

they don’t seem to care 

if their lungs explode in the chorus

– those scruffy savages

frothing at the beak –

or if they starve to death

– they sing, unrelenting

with every fibre of their frail bodies –

their incessant, arrogant cacophony

fomented it seems since the last equinox

isn’t a celebration, it’s an invitation to murder

to a clamorous massacre

in every hue and smell spring brings

as we all must partake in the rite

they’re past febrility, or even tension:

they’re out for bloody mayhem, these birds are

spurred on by a ferocious hunger

and ravenous lust for their

bellowing decrees the solitude of the flesh over

– step into the light and break body and heart –

as if the only way to cope with so much beauty

was to wreck and laugh and bleed and dance

yet it seems such a small price to pay

in the grand decadence sung

in the sunlit-engorged fury

of the birds’ extravagant song

for we know deep down they’re right

our hair prickling on the nape of the neck

and a jubilant sizzling in the pit of the stomach

with so many things to look forward to

– death, love, sex, comedies, tragedies –

on the first day of spring.

The hunger of the forest

Speared by the trident of the sun

on the hill overlooking Athens

the beast’s heart grows faint

 

The smell of charred bodies and wood

ancient and still as the rocks

weighs on the senses

The blood spangles

each drop mirroring

earth, sky and sea, and

the victor, legs akimbo

The hunger for the forest

equalled by the one of,

ravenous in its devouring of time ,

gorges up on the lives

lying there, standing there

never sated, it seems

The beast’s vitreous eyes

a glow of melancholy and ire 

the spectacular light in between

flickers like a moth’s wings

set afire on a torch

That very same flame which set

the hill overlooking Athens

ablaze like a thousand suns.

Brutes and beasts

 
He was silent for a long time.

“I laid the ghost of his gifts at last with a lie,” he began, suddenly. “Girl! What? Did I mention a girl? Oh, she is out of it—completely. They—the women, I mean—are out of it—should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it. You should have heard the disinterred body of Mr. Kurtz saying, ‘My Intended.’ You would have perceived directly then how completely she was out of it. And the lofty frontal bone of Mr. Kurtz! They say the hair goes on growing sometimes, but this—ah—specimen, was impressively bald. The wilderness had patted him on the head, and, behold, it was like a ball—an ivory ball; it had caressed him, and—lo!—he had withered; it had taken him, loved him, embraced him, got into his veins, consumed his flesh, and sealed his soul to its own by the inconceivable ceremonies of some devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. Ivory? I should think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country. ‘Mostly fossil,’ the manager had remarked, disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am; but they call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury the tusks sometimes—but evidently they couldn’t bury this parcel deep enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate. We filled the steamboat with it, and had to pile a lot on the deck. Thus he could see and enjoy as long as he could see, because the appreciation of this favour had remained with him to the last. You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh, yes, I heard him. ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—’ everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into a prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places. Everything belonged to him—but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible—it was not good for one either—trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land—I mean literally. You can’t understand. How could you?—with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums—how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude—utter solitude without a policeman—by the way of silence—utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong—too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil—I don’t know which. Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place—and whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won’t pretend to say. But most of us are neither one nor the other. The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove!—breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don’t you see? Your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in—your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, back-breaking business. And that’s difficult enough. Mind, I am not trying to excuse or even explain—I am trying to account to myself for—for—Mr. Kurtz—for the shade of Mr. Kurtz. This initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere honoured me with its amazing confidence before it vanished altogether. This was because it could speak English to me. The original Kurtz had been educated partly in England, and—as he was good enough to say himself—his sympathies were in the right place. His mother was half-English, his father was half-French. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his—let us say—nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which—as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times—were offered up to him—do you understand?—to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899