Poetry: Anthony Wade

Anthony Wade

 Whence Came The Sower?

Were the seeds sown ostensibly

to further the goal of social justice

watered with the tears of love,

or were they nourished

with the bile of malign intent?

 

Were their fruits to be filled

with honeyed sweetness

intended to draw forth acceptance

and the kindness of strangers,

or with a bitter gall

 

to sour tongues

to spit out

recrimination,

promoting

the pain of prejudice?

***

 

The Harvest

Seed sown upon hallowed ground

within the sleepy citadels of the learnéd

unmindful beneath their dreaming spires

sprang forth bearing fruit that tempted

those with an appetite for dissent,

who, like fungus unobserved in dark places,

seized that field of struggle

with scarce an alarm raised, before

suffusing society’s bastions of privilege,

seeking to raise

unassailable walls of guilt

around the voiceless

accused of inheriting

the ancestral sin of oppression,

in an age when the accusation

is the judgment, and

with the gift of forgiveness denied

and without hope of redemption,

only shame and abasement can remain.

***

 

 

Silencing Clamorous Voices

Having stood in the imagined shadow

that once stretched from the clayed feet

of a sometime soaring spire,

 

and laid hands on sky-bared walls

within an abject abbey long forlornly

gathering only inconstant winds,

 

viewed long eyeless clerestories

where retreats of raucous ravens

collectively croak their unkind canticles,

 

and witnessed the lost treasures of

defunct dynasties slowly but tellingly

exposed by small careful trowels,

 

while patient sable brushes continue

to caress from the long dark of their

forgotten ever-enduring eminence

 

time-encrusted civilisations

once believed to be beyond the reach

of the lowering winds of time,

 

I know the wisdom of shutting out

the clamorous voices of today’s truth-sayers,

of reposing trust in truth only in myself.

***

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Bio

Anthony Wade, a Forward Prize nominee, has published in poetry magazines in England, Ireland, Scotland, and as far afield as India and the USA (including Setu Bilingual), both in print and online. Irish, he lives by the sea in East Cork and is an active member of the local Writers' Group. twitter.com@anthonywadepoet

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Setu, November 2021