THE EDGE OF THE AMAZON

Poetic musing written a few weeks back in what must have been, oo, mid Octoberish, somewhat in the style, it now occurs to me, of Alex "Henry":-

Here on the edges of the Amazon the cacophany is not great

A distant squeak - 

A hedgehog?

- Is all the Sussex jungle manages, 

An outer ripple from an epicentre half a planet distant.

One tiny call is the sole vivfier of a landscape that answers with silence.

But the night is alive.

My lamp casts a soft golden glow upon the wall as I pen this diary entry of sorts,

And objects thickly strewn on my bedside table make a still life - 

They will not be ordered until well into tomorrow.

My laziness tonight is at least artistic,

My eye sharing the contentedness of my yoga-happy limbs.

I shall put down my pen,

Lamplight shall give way to candlelight,

Candlelight to darkness,

I shall sleep in comfort in this shelter of wood and tile bivouacked these several centuries since, 

In this quieter northern zone of the Amazon.

-   -   -

That's that one, then there is a short thing that I wrote in goodness knows what kind of a mood, and which, I now notice, has something of the turn, counterturn and stand structure of an Epode:-

X-Mass Soup

And so the fires return to the pubs,

Cheering my heart.

But what is this about X-Mas bookings?

With such notices they cast their stinking nets across Autumn

As if their subservience to competition has beaten all dignity from them.

Once, some intelligence brooding over the slow-evolving primordial sludge 

Found need of immense patience, 

Waiting amid the slow popping and slurping of the sleeping slime.

It seems sometimes that patience is needed still

For this prattle about Xmas is to me little more than a continuance 

Of that same-old tame-old popping and slurping

The belching of that old soup still not ready to assume a higher order.

But I shall feel better no doubt after I have had my dinner. 

Soup, I think.