Monday 31 March 2008

Avalon by coracle

The battered royal curragh
Carries three away
From a shore besmirched
With smoking pyres
And the slain of Cammlan

Sounds cacophonous that mix
Shouts of victory
With the groans of the dying
Now fade to the dipping of the oars

Wounded grievous by his own bastard progeny
Mordred son of lustful murdered Morgause
So it is Arthur ab Uther Pendragon is tended
As they ripple the water towards Avalon

It was Morgana sister to Morgause
Who eager for him to supplant the throne
Taught the berieved child
Emnity of his father

That sorceress was twisted from the first
By second sighted knowledge of her only brother
Arthur's incestual extramarital conception
When shape-changed
Uther had lain
By Merlin's magic
With Morgana's mother
The unsuspecting Igraine

Morgana set son
To kill father
Foil the cause
That the wizard began

Yet now we see her Arthur heal
Ameliorated in this gliding barge's keel

From the perilous era
After the Roman's rule ran it's course
A real hero or King depending on your source
Arthur arose in our commonly cherished myth history
For who brought us together once
Will do it again it is to be

Here we see him floating to Avalon
Tended by Morgana and Nimue
Sorceresses light and shade
With power equal feared
Come together with tears often
For their once and future king

He moving to his underworld rest
With wounds a plenty
From cuts of his power craving
Magic maddened son
Whom Arthur slew in mortal straits

Yet some deeper filial love
Brought this Morgana
To her brother in this hour of need
She whom with eldritch oft' him tried to kill
Was thwarted each time by Nimue
Now both him tend and heal

So guide they him to Avalon
In slumber we are informed
As others also lie sleeping
Beneath waves and in crystelline caves

Subsumed Titans giants
Conquered by the rising Gods
Of a newer age
But not finally destroyed
Prophesying still
From their deep sleep states

As Atlas to Atlantis
So Giant Albion to Great Britain
Waiting their curtain call
As sleepers awake
(This myth I take from one William Blake)

Nimue was loved of Merlin
She who learned all he gave
She who cast back the circling spell
With which he had her contained

Leaving him to sleep it off
In Butleigh woods for an age
Enchanted by his own enchantry
He could not help but teach her

Does he sleep here
Alongside these others

Does prime bard Taliesin himself
Fly at us through histories haze
To tell the current story
Unended as it was from his time
However blurred the fact and fable

Does he in truth enable us
Entreat us to awake ourselves
To note how that bell once again does toll
That once on Atlantean towers
So did ring

And what is it to us in this age
What of this chivalry and nonsense
What to us in our common place
And mundane electric age
Of techno screams
What from that age
Of sword wrought
Romantisized bowdlerized
Holy what-not justification
Is of use or relevence
To us now?

What of slumbering Titans
What of sleepers that wake
What of prophesying dreamers

What future is now a past projection
Recollection of memory selective
To bring these strains to you

And so what of it all?

No comments: