Dreamsong scrapbook

Drawing near the end of another chapter in Ravenna Diagram.  This is the penultimate entry.  As  usual with my ancient habits of poetry-masonry, when I get near a finishing-point, the occasional, "found" synchronicity aspect seems to come to the fore.  For better & worse, I guess - you will have to be the judge.  (One explanatory note : my grandmother Florence was born on the 4th of July 1900.)

ATTIC SCRAPBOOK

  i.m. Sir Nicholas Winton, 1909-2015

The wonder of such strange & serpentine

inversions – the fugitive figure

of a mote-motif (Apollinaire

in pipesmoke, say) turned adamantine

ground-bass.  Children of Nicholas

trained by tomb-cocoon

back to civilization –

little seedling-waifs to distant witness

stand for a hero’s welcome, basketed

in attic scrapbook (almost

lost).  So inside-out

(a Chaplin’s chaplaincy).  O helmeted

spouse of almond biosphere,

whose pergola or grape-

vine lattice lifted up

one speckled shadow, brazen spear –

sere monarch-leaf... to re-appear!

Wave-shield for life arrested –

lacquered, casketed

sybil of Sibelius, flown clear

in V-formation, still alive...

So Dante’s Florence, my

grand motherland, might be

a molting rhyme, prairie beehive

as forth from Juliet or Maggie’s den

Earth arcs one Saarinen

cat-grin – fireworks begin

to boom at dusk (Frisco, Ravenn).

    7.2.15

the late Nicholas Winton, with one of his lambs