Beauty's Truth; Truth's Beauty Poem by Orin MSH

Poetry, is foremost Duty before Art
Hard-nosed Pedantry before Artistry
The hidden glint of transient Beauty
The thankless task of turning to craft
A thousand lustreless ornaments
And not the weaving of a solitary one
The belaboured writing of a thousand verses
Before the insistence on a single line unrehearsed
Fair Poesy stands bemused in the fading light
Far from the madness and the unknown plight
The self-parodied image of the bard, broken apart,
It's Fame, corrosive to a life of impassioned Art.

To find Beauty's Truth in grey despair,
Warm breaths of the Dead still lingering in the air,
Vanity's scourge gangrened beyond repair,
Bright dreams should grow darkest of its nightmares.
Truth's Beauty in a fairy's tinsel-stranded hair
The sigh of Dread shrouding our burning spheres
Haughtiness freezes with draughts our blessed land
Pale dreams are forked into shrieking torments
Contempt now tempers those blighted denizens

Hyperion of the Golden Dawn
Nanahuatzin, god of the eternal Sun
Ameterasu, shining in many stony shrines
The miracle birthed, under the dome of Heaven
Aestas, sage-garlanded in her emerald throne
Precursors of light and the blazing bones
Midsummer's ditty trilling with endless joys
Of wind-swayed straw men and giggling Summer Boys
Lie still and soundless in their coffined pain
The ripening Summer in each futile grain,
Each heir loomed seeds are growing in disdain
Derelict, in the vastness of the Shining Plains,

Grass-sickled farmers bent double in sunburnt granaries,
The grasshoppers sing of pastureless miseries
Cicadas in a chorus of voiceless mysteries
Their fervent hopes to tide the plaguing tempest
With fruitfulness and Love, their God-begotten harvest
Through long promise of rainfall, luckless they shall remain,
Chained to their necks and burdened with a cankerous name.
From faraway ridges, surveying fair-natured company,
Yet all alone we sigh and moan, in solitude to see,
That nothing is there in the wild but gross duplicity.
The double-faced Janus reeking of figs and honey
Proclaims the passage of endless possibility
The harsher wind presaging snow
Reflected as above and so below.

Held back by the eye's light-bending curvature
The sweet nothings from lips swooned with fear
Distorting the limits of our falsifying bones
The lunatic laughingly scrounging in our brain
To reassure the faithless of their double blindness:
An only Human moral and unguided Science
The undeciphered scriptures of our darkest Signs
That the new world is theirs to tame and bless
The ominous rituals of our star-gesturing Hearts,
Splitting the Unicorn-faiths of our Forefathers apart,
In the kingdom of wild bereavements,
The stars of ancient skies lie faithful in our charts
Our grief fell plummeting onto mythic Leviathan
Choral-lanterned creatures do light our deepest abyss
Where even the damning darkness is His
Where clergies of the unmourned sputter a bleak sermon,
Down the faith-lambasting effigies of Godless unreason.
Half-sunk estuaries of the anomalous season,
Offering neither assured rhymes nor arbitrary reasons

The spindrift veils and keeps in the comforts
Of our seaweeded and kelped mermen bodies
Blood-stained and crossed
Doubled in the mortal wound
An estranged prophet sings
His cloud-hewn parables
In the Easterly Wind prophecies are gathering
The urchin-fed and sea-grown Mariners
Listening in the final address from a barnacled pulpit
Our unminding saviour peers from his lichened cloister,
Amen-ed by a host of such gladsome choristers

Engines of desires fuel foul debaucheries,
Racing down the boulevard of unredeemable sins,
Set by the dawn of darkened reveries,
Fazed players navigate the land of His, serene.
How water is awake on the seabed of the Ages
The sodden sorcerers and bedewed mages
Mesmerizing rain to speak in scorned vernacular
The heaven's prodigy & splendid orator
Thunder peals and clappers fold us as in a dance
Nature-abhorred, most exotic-strange oracular
Displayed by these quixotic-misshapen Lens.

Apologies to the Madam of shadows and the darkly Sirs
Gowned with the surreal and clothed in the eldritch
Bone-corseted and skeleton-britched
The green-syllabled sound of distant wailing waves
Sirens and baited mermaids break into delirious raves
Crooning lost seamen with beguiling serenades
Deep down in the penitentiary, eternal-fired Hades

Poseidon through the watery graves
Breaking in hard through beast-wrought seas
Methuselah in the wounded flesh
Whose lapping shapes arise to greet the stars
The haunting sounds of unearthly Arias
Echoing in Morpheus' hollow dreamless Sleep
A dark refrain now playing in the Meadows Deep.

Their unsent epithets are poems unto themselves
The nouns and verbs of our hearts the Poet must espouse
The wild-bloomed nectar and elixir'd woodlouse
Idioms of wisdom that shall always be championed
More terrible aspects and horrifying mien
Of shattered Truths and touted Heresies
From sandy heroned-banks to balmy estuaries
Gentle Innocents, bowered from the pagan Wild
The darkness-assaying half-heretic Child.

Thus Poetry, is both Duty and Art
The rigorous Scholar before the rumpled Maven
Both indistinguishable in our windy Heaven
The snide Poetaster before the masterful Bard
Whose thankless labour turns stony artefacts to craft
Whose words are both unrivalled wit and trifling daft
Beauty and Truth are one in our wordy Paradise
Both worthless tripe and rhapsodies of the Wise
Our treasured Lines, in Youth as in Demise.

(Orin Marlais Keats: 15h July 2022)