Poem
WN Herbert
OMNESIA
OMNESIA
OMNESIA
I left my bunnet on a trainGlenmorangie upon the plane,
I dropped my notebook down a drain;
I failed to try or to explain,
I lost my gang but kept your chain –
say, shall these summers come again,
Omnesia?
You’d like to think it’s God that sees ya
(while He’s painting the parrots of Polynesia)
give your wife that fragrant freesia
and not the eye of Blind Omnesia.
I scrabbled here and scribbled there –
a sphere of peers declined to care;
I roomed with hibernating bears
and roamed where cartoon beagles dare:
protect me by not being there,
Our Lady of Congealed Despair,
Omnesia!
You’d like the universe to please ya,
your admin duties to be easier,
instead you grip the pole that’s greasier –
the shinbone of unskinned Omnesia.
I wibbled there and wobbled here,
forgot the thousandth name of beer;
I filled my head with clashing gears
and tried to live in other years;
I passed on fame, selected fear,
watered your name with ‘Poor Bill’ tears,
Omnesia...
So you lack ambition and pelf don’t tease ya?
still, me-memed mugwump prats police ya,
and Brit-farce forces queue to seize ya
for the purloined pearls of Aunt Omnesia.
I’d like to think the Muse remembers –
not that teaching starts in late September –
but the first of fire’s dying embers,
that glow on Cleopatra’s members;
my further lovers’ choric timbres…
Did I fiddle with their numbers,
Omnesia?
You hope it isn’t Fate who knees ya,
the Ship of Fools which makes you queasier,
or Mister Scythey come to ease ya
into the arms of Dame Omnesia.
© 2012, WN Herbert
From: Omnesia
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books, Northumberland
From: Omnesia
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books, Northumberland
WN Herbert
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1961)
WN Herbert – called by Don Paterson “One maverick genius of a compatriot” – is a prolific, and prolifically virtuosic, poet, both influential in contemporary Scottish poetry and also inimitable. Following on from the previous generation of poets like MacDiarmid and Edwin Morgan, he writes in the Scots dialect as well as in exuberant, inventive English. One of his subjects, whatever his poem is ...
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OMNESIA
I left my bunnet on a trainGlenmorangie upon the plane,
I dropped my notebook down a drain;
I failed to try or to explain,
I lost my gang but kept your chain –
say, shall these summers come again,
Omnesia?
You’d like to think it’s God that sees ya
(while He’s painting the parrots of Polynesia)
give your wife that fragrant freesia
and not the eye of Blind Omnesia.
I scrabbled here and scribbled there –
a sphere of peers declined to care;
I roomed with hibernating bears
and roamed where cartoon beagles dare:
protect me by not being there,
Our Lady of Congealed Despair,
Omnesia!
You’d like the universe to please ya,
your admin duties to be easier,
instead you grip the pole that’s greasier –
the shinbone of unskinned Omnesia.
I wibbled there and wobbled here,
forgot the thousandth name of beer;
I filled my head with clashing gears
and tried to live in other years;
I passed on fame, selected fear,
watered your name with ‘Poor Bill’ tears,
Omnesia...
So you lack ambition and pelf don’t tease ya?
still, me-memed mugwump prats police ya,
and Brit-farce forces queue to seize ya
for the purloined pearls of Aunt Omnesia.
I’d like to think the Muse remembers –
not that teaching starts in late September –
but the first of fire’s dying embers,
that glow on Cleopatra’s members;
my further lovers’ choric timbres…
Did I fiddle with their numbers,
Omnesia?
You hope it isn’t Fate who knees ya,
the Ship of Fools which makes you queasier,
or Mister Scythey come to ease ya
into the arms of Dame Omnesia.
From: Omnesia
OMNESIA
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