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The Last You See

  • 17-09-2014 3:27pm
    #1
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,427 Mod ✭✭✭✭


    Can't think what regular thread this should go into - perhaps it's time for a "elegant exit, sans dieu" sticky? Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night" should be there, but who and what else?

    Anyhow, Clive James - who described religions as "advertising agencies for a product that doesn't exist" - is enduring a final illness which seems to have done nothing to blunt his pen. The New Yorker published this rather beautiful poem this last Monday:

    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/japanese-maple
    Clive James wrote:
    Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
    So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
    Breath growing short
    Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
    Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

    Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
    So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
    On that small tree
    And saturates your brick back garden walls,
    So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

    Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
    This glistening illuminates the air.
    It never ends.
    Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
    Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

    My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
    Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
    What I must do
    Is live to see that. That will end the game
    For me, though life continues all the same:

    Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
    A final flood of colors will live on
    As my mind dies,
    Burned by my vision of a world that shone
    So brightly at the last, and then was gone.


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