Poetry

DUST

No movement but will make it's havoc

In the moted air. Have you watched the stir

Of dust behind you on the stair, the hassock

Yields its quota to your prayer?

In putting on or off of linen fair, of stomachers,
Y-fronts or buskins, must be dust
Full-fashioned as the particles which rose
And wreathed young Helen's hair, Telmachus
The fabled Greek, the musk of Judas
Clinging to the pale Christ's cheek.

At once remotest ancestor and yet

Our last posterity, inert, inanimate,

Forever mobile, inartiulate: the dust's

A contract in the scheme of things, a debt

Outstanding to be paid in kind.

Of dust, the stuff of stars and death,
A metaphor outworn by priests,
Ignored by poets drawing breath
Or something cataclysmic in the way
Of similie, there is nothing new to say.

There was nothing new to say of dust

Until all on a summer's day

Hiroshima rose up, and a dust

Most radiantly new fell out

And came to stay.

Gabriel Fielding- 1955