Last updated on 21/12/2024

Masquerade, 2024.

Preface

I wrote this poem when I was twenty-two before I went to university. It is a celebration of the poem by W. B Yeates, The Fisherman. It is based on a version of the piece that I published in 2019.

Eugene and the masquerade have gone.

Now I sit alone,
facing the solitude of my empty sheets,
as thinkers must,
confronting the chilling challenge of pauperous paper,
alone, simple and wise.

Alone, I face the desolate whiteness of my empty sheet,
thinking back to the time when faces shone
as voices bubbled over dancing feet,
as into these black lines, I wind
poignant memories of dancers,
shining faces and masks in the night,
spiralling in a room to the rhythms of delight.

It was a dance of actors, as they played the masque
in the drama of their mutable lives.

A chance meeting with an Irish youth,
who spoke of poetry and truth,
his soul occluded behind
the mask of a beautiful face.

I see you Eugene: your sun-freckled face,
and grey Connemara clothes,
the salmon-laden rivers of your lake.
I hear you speaking your love
of poetry, for its own sake.

*

I left the dance, where strangers
spoke of poetry, behind their masks,
recording the passing of experience.

I came home from the exultant dance,
fuelled, by the frenzies in my mind,
to confront providence with my pen,
capturing, before it dies, the fleeting chance.

Facing my ghosts and demons, in the dark,
by wielding my nibbed sword,
I slayed the shibboleth of beauty
knowing it was but a moment
in the long conflict of time.

Beauty is made of dust, Eugene,
and to dust your face must return.
Into these cerements, I wind
the decaying remains of the passing day.

And the memory of your youthful words,
brief poetry blown away by the winds of time.

My memoriam of a youth, so fine,
now turned to stone,
as I carve, in ink,
your alabastrine shrine.

*

Why do we love beauty?
The soul is seen beneath the masked realities of life.
We must be heroes if we are to love,
to grasp the fleeting beauty of a face or day
before it’s blown away by slow decay.

The image of a beautiful face –
is that worth pulling from the crematorium of change?
Can the pen cheat death?
Bring back one moment from decomposing lime
the death-dark, grave-gray sepulchre of time.

I battle with the demons of my past,
severing now, with my pen, the Gorgon’s head
as I resurrect the dancers from the dead,
bring back to life the moment when
a youth spoke of his love of poetry.

You, I have immortalised, Eugene,
carved, with these words, your monument,
commemorating the night
when I chanced upon your life
and loved the beauty of your words and face.

*

Eugene is asleep now in the arms of his beautiful friend,
his eyes closed as in a sleep of death,
wound in white sheets they lie together happy and grave.

The dancers departed, their masque discarded,
I alone continue with the dance,
here with my isolated sheet,
penning the monuments of death,
immortalising one poetic man,
chiselling out the features of a visage
to represent the stature of the mind
of a youth who spoke of poetry with grace,
a man whose mortality does seem,
a youth with a maskéd face,
a man who was but a dream.

Your face, Eugene, now wrinkled, grey like mine.
That moment turned to ashes of inevitable decay.

Into these lines I have drawn
a poem as cold and passionate as the dawn.