Absences By Dom Moraes Smear out the last star./No lights from the islands/Or hills. In the great square...
Smear out the last star. No lights from the islands Or hills. In the great square The prolonged vowel of silence Makes itself plainly heard. Rounded the ghost of a headland Clouds, leaves, shreds of bird Eddy, hindering the wind. No vigils left to keep. No enemies left to slaughter The rough roofs of the slopes Loosely thatched with splayed water Only shelter microliths and fossils. Unwatched, the rainbows build On the arhitraves of hills. No wound left to be healed. Nobody left to be beautiful. No polyp admiral to sip Blood and whisky from a skull While fingering his warships. Terrible relics, by tiderace Untouched, the stromalites breathe. Bubbles plop on the surface, Disturbing the balance of death. No sounds would be heard if So much silence was not heard. Clouds scuff like sheep on the cliff. The echoes of stones are restored. No longer any foreshore Nor any abyss, this World only held together By its variety of absences. The omnibus edition, A Variety Of Absences is a collection of memoirs by Dom Moraes and brings together three classic autobiographical books. Gone Away, My Son's Father and Never at Home, each published to immense critical acclaim, constitute a fascinating story of a young man's passage from a traumatic childhood and adolescence to manhood, surviving early fame, alcohol, strange exiles and difficult loves. Dominic Francis Moraes, the only son of Frank and Beryl Moraes, a poet and prose writer of near iconic status in India was born in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1938. At nineteen he published his first book of poems, A Beginning, which won the Hawthornden Prize, at that time the most coveted literary award in England. His second book of verse, Poems (1960), became the Autumn Choice of the Poetry Book Society. Apart from these, he has published eight other collections of poems, and twenty-three prose books, including a biography, Mrs. Gandhi, and the memoirs Never at Home and My Son's Father. He returned to Bombay in 1969 and worked for the Indian Express. As a correspondent, he covered wars in Algeria, Israel and Vietnam for the Express. In 1971 he became editor of The Asia Magazine, and in 1976 he joined the UN. He returned to India in 1979, lived in Bombay and died there on June 2, 2004 following a heart attack. He would have been 66 that year. _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list [email protected] http://lists.goanet.org/listinfo.cgi/goanet-goanet.org
